The shelling did not begin in April. It began on April 13, 2024, when the RSF opened its offensive on El Fasher and the two camps on its flank became targets of what came next. The Sudan Tribune logged the dates the way a funeral home keeps a register. June 2024: nineteen killed at Abu Shouk. August 26: twenty-four killed, forty injured. December 5: twelve killed near Zamzam, four more inside. January 11, 2025: sixteen killed in one shelling. February 12: thirty-one killed after two days of attacks, thousands fleeing north to the town of Tawila on foot. By the time the April offensive began, residents had lived for a year under the sound of incoming artillery, rationing grain that arrived from aid convoys that sometimes never arrived at all.

The ground assault began on April 10, 2025, and continued through Saturday, April 12. RSF fighters struck Zamzam's central marketplace, the Relief International clinic, the Medecins Sans Frontieres hospital, the mud-brick houses of the Labado and Ahmadai neighborhoods. Hundreds of structures burned. On April 12, a single attack on Zamzam killed and wounded hundreds in a few hours. At Abu Shouk the same day, at least thirty-five civilians were killed. United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator Clementine Nkweta-Salami confirmed at least one hundred fatalities across both settlements, but survivors, aid workers, and the General Coordination of Displaced Persons and Refugees used a different word: massacre. By April 13, the RSF claimed the camps. Up to four hundred thousand people were displaced again. Many could not leave at all, pinned inside the ruins with no food, no water, no way out.

On April 29, an RSF-allied militia intercepted a convoy evacuating Zamzam. They arrested forty aid workers. They took about fifty civilians who were trying to walk out. The abductions were announced by the camp spokesman, then confirmed by Radio Dabanga and Sudan Tribune. The aid workers had been distributing food and running the clinics that the shelling had not yet destroyed. The civilians were simply leaving. In May, reports emerged that the RSF had converted what remained of Zamzam into military barracks, using the foundations of a refugee camp as the foundations of a forward base. Fire had done the rest. Satellite images through April and May showed systematic arson across the settlement, street by street.

The RSF issued a formal denial, claiming that footage of the suffering had been staged. The General Coordination of Displaced Persons and Refugees kept publishing names when they could find them, along with ages, and the villages in Darfur the victims had fled twenty years earlier. Human rights organizations classified the attacks as crimes against humanity and potential war crimes. The Guardian published a reconstruction titled 'They slaughtered us like animals,' built from survivor testimony collected over the summer. What the survivors asked for, mostly, was that people know who had died, and why, and where. Knowing names is the first small act of restoring dignity to people who were meant to be erased.

The coordinates 13.49 degrees north, 25.31 degrees east mark a flat stretch of North Darfur that the maps still label Zamzam. From the air in 2026, the shape of a camp is still visible in the scorched outlines of streets, but the population is scattered. The people who lived here are now in Tawila, or walking toward Chad, or still trapped in El Fasher under siege. The ones who did not make it are buried in ground their ancestors chose because they thought it would be safer than the place they had come from. That is the arithmetic of genocide repeating itself: each generation walks further, and each generation is told to walk again.