Mass Killings, Sexual Violence and Famine Grip North Darfur as Rebels Prepare El Fasher Assault
Humanitarian Crises 07/07/2025 •
North Darfur capital of El-Fasher from above.

Mass atrocities, rape, famine, sexual and ethnically targeted violence have plagued Sudan’s civil war since it erupted two years ago. With peace nowhere in sight, a new report released by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) recounts in devastating detail: nothing has changed. 

Based on interviews with over 80 civilians, MSF data and direct observations from its medical teams, the report documents the violence and humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, where the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have encircled hundreds of thousands of people while laying the city under siege.

Mass killings and starvation are underway, MSF found. Food, water, and humanitarian aid are blockaded. Food shops and markets, water towers and pumps, hospitals and healthcare facilities are under constant attack.

The Sudan Doctors Network reports 239 children have died from malnutrition in El Fasher since January as nearly half of Sudan’s remaining population facing acute food insecurity turn to boiling weeds and wild plants to survive.

Gunfire, airstrikes and artillery are already raining down on the city as the warring factions compete for control. But MSF warned further escalation is still possible: an all-out RSF assault on the capital.

“In light of the ethnically motivated mass atrocities committed on the Masalit in West Darfur back in June 2023, and of the massacres perpetrated in Zamzam camp in North Darfur, we fear such a scenario will be repeated in El Fasher,” said Mathilde Simon, MSF’s humanitarian affairs advisor. “This onslaught of violence must stop.”

‘Clean El Fasher’ 

An MSF nurse attends to a patient amid the violence in North Darfur, April 2025. / MSF

Ethnically targeted attacks by the RSF on non-Arab communities, particularly the Zaghawa, are “protracting the ethnic violence that has ravaged Darfur for over twenty years,” MSF said.

“RSF and their affiliates repeatedly shelled neighbourhoods and gathering places of civilians known to be from non-Arab communities, ground attacks were systematically carried out, involving the looting of belongings, killing of civilians and razing of houses and infrastructure,” the report found. “Sexual violence was widely perpetrated, and numerous abductions were reported.”

The RSF is a descendant of the Janjaweed militia that led the Darfur genocide, targeting non-Arabs across the region and killing an estimated 300,000 people from 2003 to 2005. 

Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the general known as Hemedti who heads the RSF, led Janjaweed paramilitaries that burned villages, killed civilians and raped ethnic Africans across his native Darfur during the genocide. These crimes led to the indictment of his then-commander and deposed Sudanese president, Omar al-Bashir, by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and genocide.

With the shadow of a repeat of history looming over the province, MSF reported several witnesses testified they overheard RSF soldiers airing plans to “clean El Fasher,” raising the spectre of a second genocide – or that it is already underway.

“Only God knows what will happen in El Fasher,” one man, 41, told doctors. “But if the RSF take El Fasher, they will carry out ethnic cleansing and genocide, like what happened in El Geneina.”

El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, was systematically cleared of its Massalit population by RSF and allied militias through killing and forced displacement in 2023. The total number dead in the violence is unknown. A UN expert panel estimated between 10,000 and 15,000 people were killed, while Sudanese Red Crescent staff identified 2,000 bodies on the capital’s streets before they stopped counting.

As MSF urges the warring parties to spare civilians and grant access for humanitarian organisations to provide critical aid to people in need, RSF forces took control of the tri-border area with Libya and Egypt in June, gaining control over critical supply routes and threatening to open new fronts in the civil war. 

“As patients and communities tell their stories to our teams and asked us to speak out, while their suffering is hardly on the international agenda, we felt compelled to document these patterns of relentless violence that have been crushing countless lives in general indifference and inaction over the past year,” Simon said.

Despite a UN arms embargo, weapons continue flowing to both sides through neighbouring countries, several of which, including Libya, Chad and the Central African Republic, are major arms trafficking hubs, UN experts say. 

While Egypt and Saudi Arabia back government forces, the UAE, Libya and Russian-linked Wagner Group support the RSF. The UAE has invested over $6 billion in Sudan since 2018, viewing the resource-rich nation as key to expanding its regional influence.

Around 40,000 people have been killed and 13 million displaced since the civil war began in April 2023, according to the latest UN estimates.

Peace, at this juncture, is nowhere in sight.

Nowhere to hide

Over 400,000 people were forced to flee to El Fasher from the Zamzam refugee camp, the largest displacement encampment in Sudan just south of the city, after an RSF ground assault in April that killed more than 500 civilians.

Those who made it to the city “remained trapped, out of reach of humanitarian aid and exposed to attacks and further mass violence,” MSF said – and there is no way out.

“Survivors who managed to flee have undergone further violence along the road, with men being specifically targeted, women and girls being raped and civilian convoys attacked,” the report found. 

“The harrowing level of violence on the roads out of El Fasher and Zamzam means that many people are trapped or take life-threatening risks when fleeing. Men and boys are at high risk of killing and abduction, while women and girls are subjected to widespread sexual violence.”

The millions who successfully flee Sudan find crisis there too.The World Food Programme warned Wednesday that life-saving assistance may soon shut down in the Central African Republic, Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya, South Sudan and Uganda – all grappling with their own domestic food insecurity needs – as funding cuts and new arrivals overwhelm support systems.

“This is a full-blown regional crisis that’s playing out in countries that already have extreme levels of food insecurity and high levels of conflict,” said Shaun Hughes, WFP’s Emergency Coordinator for the Sudan Regional Crisis. “Refugees from Sudan are fleeing for their lives and yet are being met with more hunger, despair, and limited resources on the other side of the border.”

Rape as a weapon of war

Violence and attacks on healthcare forced MSF to shut down operations in El Fasher and Zamzam camp.

Sexual violence has been a central feature of the violence in Sudan throughout the war. While both the Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF have been found to commit sexual war crimes, the overwhelming majority are attributed to the RSF and its allies.

The UN Independent fact-finding mission on Sudan and Amnesty International separately found the militia had engaged in widespread sexual and gender-based violence, rape, sexual slavery, and abduction, among other crimes against humanity. RSF forces are further accused of using mass rape as a weapon of war and to assist ethnic cleansing efforts, using rape as a tool to drive fear and force women to flee.

“I have a certificate for first aid nursing. [When they stopped us], the RSF asked me to give them my bag. When they saw the certificate inside, they told me, ‘You want to heal the Sudanese army, you want to cure the enemy!,'” one woman, 27, told MSF. “Then they burnt my certificate and they took me away to rape me.”

No comprehensive statistics on sexual violence in Sudan exist. The latest number on confirmed cases, compiled by the advocacy group Together Against Rape and Sexual Violence and published on 4 June, documented 377 cases of rape since the war began.

Data on rape and sexual assault in war zones are notoriously inexact. In Sudan, survivors face an array of barriers from social stigma, to lack of adequate medical support, and a dysfunctional judicial system with no means to protect or prosecute if they speak out. The Sudanese government’s Unit for Combating Violence Against Women previously warned verified rape cases may represent as little as 2% of the total.

Since the start of the war, the number of people at risk of gender-based violence has more than tripled to 12.1 million people – 25% of the country’s population. The number of gender-based violence survivors seeking services increased 288% in 2024, according to UN Women.

The most harrowing finding came from Unicef in May: 221 rape cases against children were recorded by since the beginning of 2024. The youngest reported survivors were four one-year-olds. Sixteen child rape survivors, including the infants, were under 5 years of age. 

“Children as young as one being raped by armed men should shock anyone to their core and compel immediate action,” said Unicef executive director Catherine Russell.

Unicef found an additional 77 instances of sexual assaults against children, mostly attempted rape cases. Two-thirds of recorded cases were girls, but 33% were boys, which the agency noted requires “specific attention as they may face stigma and unique challenges in reporting, seeking help, and accessing services.”

“Millions of children in Sudan are at risk of rape and other forms of sexual violence, which is being used as a tactic of war. This is an abhorrent violation of international law and could constitute a war crime. It must stop.”

Southern spiral

The violence consuming Sudan threatens to spill across its southern border, where South Sudan, the world’s youngest nation, stands on the brink of a new civil war of its own.

South Sudan won independence from Sudan in 2011, ending the longest civil war in the history of the African continent. Twenty-two years of violence, disease and famine killed 2 million people, the highest civilian death toll since World War II.

Independence was quickly followed by civil war. In 2013, a break-down of the power-sharing agreement negotiated two years earlier resulted in five years of war, killing 400,000 and displacing 4 million before a new power-sharing agreement brokered in 2018 brought fragile peace to the fledgling state.

That agreement collapsed once again in March when President Salva Kiir’s forces arrested his former deputy Riek Machar, mirroring Sudan’s trajectory when two rival generals, charged with overseeing the country’s transition to democracy, instead dragged the country and its 50 million people into all-out war.

Since March, violence against civilians in South Sudan has since reached its highest level since 2020, the UN reported Wednesday, with 1,607 attacks in the first quarter of this year. Those include 739 civilians killed, 679 injured, 149 abducted, and 40 subjected to conflict-related sexual violence between January and March.

The escalating violence is already pushing South Sudanese civilians towards famine. Over 22,000 people are likely already starving, while nearly 60% of the population faces life-threatening food insecurity as a result of the escalating violence, the IPC warned in June.

Armed groups move freely across the porous border drawn only in 2011, with overlapping ethnic militias and historic alliances threatening to erase the fragile line between two conflicts – trapping 61 million people, once again, in a renewed cycle of violence.

“Given this grim situation, we are left with no other conclusion, but to assess that South Sudan is teetering on the edge of a relapse into civil war,” Nicolas Haysom, the UN’s top official in South Sudan, warned when the peace deal collapsed. “It would devastate not only South Sudan but the entire region, which simply cannot afford another war.”

Image Credits: MSF, UN Sudan Envoy.

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