El Fasher's population before the siege was estimated at 252,000, down from 264,734 in 2008 but swollen by displacement from the surrounding countryside. The city had been the last major urban center in Darfur held by Sudanese government forces and aligned militias, and for people from ethnic groups the RSF had been targeting, Fur, Masalit, Zaghawa, it was the only place left that felt like refuge. Siham Hassan, a Sudanese politician and activist and the youngest parliamentarian in the country's history, was among those killed when the city fell. She was one name out of thousands. Al Jazeera analysts believed tens of thousands were killed in the first days after the RSF entered. Reuters interviewed witnesses who described fifty or sixty bodies in a single street. The people dying were teachers, shopkeepers, nurses, grandmothers, children: civilians identified by ethnicity, language, and neighborhood.

The Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale School of Public Health tracked what was happening using satellite imagery, because the ground had become unreachable. In reports published on 27 and 28 October, then again in December, the HRL documented mass killing and, later, systematic efforts to hide it. The researchers identified sites where the RSF appeared to be burying and burning bodies. Thousands were disposed of this way, according to the analysis. The Guardian published satellite images its headline called evidence of a slaughterhouse. When Tom Fletcher, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs chief, traveled near El Fasher in mid-November to meet RSF officials, his UN vehicle was struck by a drone before the meeting. RSF officials promised him aid access. He pushed for entry he said would come in days, not months. Aid workers finally reached the city in late December and found, in the Reuters phrase, little life.

The United States senior advisor for Arab and African affairs, Massad Boulos, called the attacks abhorrent. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking after a G7 meeting on 12 November 2025, acknowledged that murder, rape, and sexual violence had occurred, and called for international action to cut weapons to the RSF. He did not name the United Arab Emirates, which has backed the RSF and whose vice president, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, has met with RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. The UAE condemned the massacre, pledged AED 367.25 million in aid, and, through senior diplomat Anwar Gargash, acknowledged that international failure to sanction the RSF and SAF after Sudan's 2021 coup had been a collective mistake. In December 2025 the United Kingdom sanctioned four senior RSF commanders for their roles: Abdul Rahim Dagalo (Hemedti's brother), Gedo Hamdan Ahmed, Brigadier General Al-Fateh Abdullah Idris, and Field Commander Tijani Ibrahim Moussa Mohamed.

To understand the weight of El Fasher's fall, you have to go back. The Darfur genocide that began in 2003 killed an estimated 300,000 people and displaced roughly 2.7 million, mostly Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa, and mostly at the hands of Janjaweed militias that would later be reconstituted as the RSF. Survivors of that campaign ended up in camps around El Fasher: Zamzam, Abu Shouk, Al Salam. Their children and grandchildren grew up inside those camps. When the siege of El Fasher began in April 2024, the descendants of the first genocide were among the people now being starved and shelled. When the siege ended, they were among those being killed. Amnesty International's November 2025 testimonies describe deliberate RSF targeting of these communities. The word genocide is legal, careful, and contested. It is also the word survivors themselves keep using.

Salih Mahmoud Abdelmoneim wrote in Al Jazeera in December 2025 that the world must refuse a new normal of mass atrocities in Darfur. The essay was not rhetorical. Sudan's war has killed an estimated 150,000 people and displaced 12 million since April 2023; El Fasher is one episode in a catastrophe the international community has largely filed under forgotten. The RSF's attempt to hide its killings beneath the ground, and the HRL's patient work watching that ground from space, together make a record. Whether that record prevents what happens next in Nyala, in Kadugli, in other Darfur towns still accessible to RSF fighters, depends on decisions being made in Abu Dhabi, Washington, London, and the African Union. The dead of El Fasher are already beyond those decisions. The living, scattered in Chad and Port Sudan and further, are waiting.