The fall of the Sudanese city of el-Fasher to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has resulted in mass killings by the group, according to an analysis of satellite imagery viewed by Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL).
The RSF had laid siege to el-Fasher, the capital city of North Darfur in western Sudan, for more than a year and a half. Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan announced the withdrawal of his forces from their last stronghold in the wider Darfur region late on Monday, a day after the paramilitary RSF seized control of the main Sudanese army base in el-Fasher and declared victory there.
The fall of el-Fasher has “resulted in the carpet-bombing of large swaths of the city by Sudan Armed Forces, an unknown number of civilian casualties caused by both sides, and almost 15 months of IPC-5 Famine conditions in areas caused by RSF’s siege of the city”, the HRL report said. The HRL determined this by reviewing satellite imagery and open source and remote sensing data from Monday.
“El-Fasher appears to be in a systematic and intentional process of ethnic cleansing of Fur, Zaghawa, and Berti indigenous non-Arab communities through forced displacement and summary execution,” the HRL said.
The RSF has long been accused of targeting non-Arab communities in Darfur, and the HRL, aid groups and experts have previously warned of mass violence and displacement if el-Fasher fell.
HRL’s report showed images containing clusters of objects and ground discolouration that it believes to be evidence of human bodies. The HRL appears to back up other accounts from aid groups that reported chaotic scenes on the ground, including killings, arrests and attacks on hospitals.
“The actions by RSF presented in this report may be consistent with war crimes and crimes against humanity (CAH) and may rise to the level of genocide,” the report said.
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