New satellite images suggest mass killings persist in Sudan's El-Fasher

New satellite imagery suggests that mass killings are likely continuing in and around the Sudanese city of El-Fasher, Yale researchers said, days after it fell to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

At war with the regular army since April 2023, the RSF seized El-Fasher on Sunday, pushing the army out its last stronghold in the western Darfur region after a grinding 18-month siege. Since the city's fall, reports have emerged of summary executions, sexual violence, attacks on aid workers, looting and abductions, while communications remain largely cut off.

A report by Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab on Friday said fresh images gave them reason to believe much of the population may be "dead, captured, or in hiding". The lab identified at least 31 clusters of objects consistent with human bodies between Monday and Friday, across neighbourhoods, university grounds and military sites.

"Indicators that mass killing is continuing are clearly visible," the lab said. Survivors from El-Fasher who reached the nearby town of Tawila have told AFP of mass killings, children shot before their parents, and civilians beaten and robbed as they fled.

Hayat, a mother of five who fled El-Fasher, said that "young men travelling with us were stopped" along the way by paramilitaries and "we don't know what happened to them".

The UN said more than 65,000 people have fled El-Fasher but tens of thousands remain trapped.

Around 260,000 people were in the city before the RSF's final assault.

The RSF claimed to have arrested several fighters accused of abuses on Thursday, but UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher questioned the RSF's commitment to investigate violations.

Both the RSF and the army have faced war crimes accusations over the course of the conflict.

El-Fasher's capture gives the RSF full control over all five state capitals in Darfur, effectively splitting Sudan along an east-west axis, with the army controlling the north, east and centre.

'Large numbers' in Sudan's El-Fasher facing death: MSF

Doctors Without Borders on Saturday said it feared an ongoing potentially fatal situation for "large numbers of people" in Sudan's El-Fasher, which has been captured by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. Thousands of people have fled from El-Fasher, which fell to the RSF on October 26 after an 18-month siege. Since then, testimonies of bloody violence targeting civilians have proliferated.

In a statement, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) denounced the "horrendous mass atrocities and killings, both indiscriminate and ethnically-targeted", that have occurred in and around El-Fasher this week.

"Large numbers of people remain in grave danger and are being prevented by the Rapid Support Forces and its allies from reaching safer areas, such as Tawila where we work," the NGO added.

But the numbers of people arriving to Tawila, a nearby region, "don't add up, while accounts of large-scale atrocities are mounting", according to MSF's head of emergencies Michel Olivier Lacharite.

"Where are all the missing people who have already survived months of famine and violence in El-Fasher?" he said.

"The most likely, albeit frightening, answer is that they are being killed, blocked, and hunted down when trying to flee."

Humanitarian organisations fear ethnically motivated atrocities similar to those committed in the early 2000s in Darfur by the Arab Janjaweed militias, from which the RSF originated.

Several eyewitnesses told MSF that a group of 500 civilians, along with soldiers from the Sudanese Armed Forces and the army-allied Joint Forces, had attempted to flee on October 26, but most were killed or captured by the RSF and their allies.

Survivors reported that people were separated based on their gender, age or presumed ethnic identity, and that many are still being held for ransom. One survivor described "horrific scenes" where fighters crushed prisoners with their vehicles.

The war in Sudan has killed thousands of people, displaced millions more and triggered the world's worst humanitarian crisis, according to the United Nations.

The conflict erupted in April 2023 with a power struggle between two former allies: General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane, army chief and Sudan's de facto leader since the 2021 coup, and RSF chief General Mohamed Daglo.