Sudan's Ignored Genocide and the Tragic Fall of El-Fasher

“More people could have died there in ten days than have died in the past two years of the war in Gaza.” Those were the words of Nathaniel Raymond, Executive Director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale’s School of Public Health, speaking to Al-Jazeera about the fall of El-Fasher. The capital of North Darfur was overrun by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces after more than 550 days of siege.

This siege was followed by bloodletting on a scale unimaginable even by the grim standards of Sudan’s civil war. When the RSF stormed the city—long the last holdout of the official Sudanese Armed Forces—it did so with bloodthirsty glee not seen in modern warfare for a long time. Civilians were chased through the surrounding desert, rounded up, and butchered en masse.

The Scale of the Slaughter in El-Fasher and Beyond

Door-to-door ethnic massacres were carried out, leaving bloodstains so vast they could be seen from space. The last functioning hospital was breached, and every doctor and patient remaining inside was butchered by the victorious fighters. Following the fall of the city, tens of thousands of people remained unaccounted for.

Satellite imagery has picked out mass graves being hastily dug at the edges of the city. In a joint investigation between Britain’s Sky News, Sudan War Monitor, and Lighthouse Reports, the authors referred to “killing fields” where the paramilitaries carried out their crimes. An estimate from Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab suggests nearly 69,000 people were slaughtered in just ten days.

But while the news out of El-Fasher has been horrific, this crisis extends far beyond the fall of a single city and the bloodbath that followed. Instead, this reflects the wider war in Sudan, a conflict in which atrocities as horrific as those in El-Fasher have been carried out—albeit at a smaller scale—for two-and-a-half years. Throughout these two-and-a-half years, over 400,000 people are thought to have been killed.

Entire cities have been sacked and burned, while parts of the capital, Khartoum, were transformed into execution sites where untold civilians were tortured to death. Alongside the violence, famine has stalked the land, leaving starving, glassy-eyed children in its wake. Most of all, however, this represents a profound failure of the international community, which knew what was happening and did nothing to stop it.

The world at last seems to be waking up after the horrors of El-Fasher, but it could have easily prevented the massacre from happening in the first place.

A Global Silence Amid Mounting Evidence

To clarify what it means to say the world ignored Sudan, the blame does not lie with ordinary citizens distracted by the hardships of daily life. Nor does it mean that no one has been covering Sudan’s atrocity exhibition. Dedicated outlets like Sudan War Monitor have been tracking the horrors since day one, and brave Sudanese journalists have risked death to report from the frontlines.

In the West, experts like Alex de Waal, analysts like Cameron Hudson, and various publications have relentlessly covered this topic, trying to make the international community care. And yet, the broader global public largely ignored the crisis. Aside from the very opening days of the war, Sudan never trended significantly on social media platforms.

No mass protests called for the governments of the United States, France, or Great Britain to stop selling weapons to the RSF’s main backer, the United Arab Emirates, despite mountains of evidence that Abu Dhabi was funneling Western military equipment to the paramilitaries. No coordinated boycotts targeted Emirates airlines, and few public campaigns were launched to show solidarity with the Sudanese people. This indifference is just as true of countries in Africa as it is of Europe, the Americas, or Asia.

Days after El-Fasher fell, the African Union proudly issued statements regarding its aspirations for silencing the guns and political engagement to prevent atrocities. Of the atrocities that had just taken place in Sudan, there was not even a mention. Meanwhile, neighboring nations continue to help fuel the conflict.

Chad allows the UAE to fly weapons for the RSF into a secret airbase near the border. Kenya hosts the RSF’s leader—a warlord known as Hemedti—as he seeks legitimacy for his parallel government, built upon the bones of Darfur’s Black African minorities. Libya, under General Khalifa Haftar, allows smuggling to the RSF across its borders.

Further afield, Russia long supplied the paramilitaries, before switching support to the Sudanese Armed Forces when they appeared to be winning.

The Challenge of Quantifying a Catastrophe

The blind eye turned towards Sudan’s suffering is a truly global problem. This crisis is one that the wider world has collectively closed its eyes to, even as populations passionately hold opinions about conflicts in Gaza or Ukraine. And this is not—and has never been—a small war.

Even before the likely slaughter of tens of thousands in El-Fasher, Sudan’s conflict was shaping up to be one of the worst so far fought this century. The exact figures of how many have died remain open to debate because, as Nathaniel Raymond has repeatedly noted, many of those who would do the counting are themselves dead or displaced. So many hospitals and morgues have been destroyed, doctors killed, and academics or potential monitors driven to flee, that accurate data is almost impossible to gather.

This compounds a pre-existing problem in Sudan of exceptionally poor record-keeping. Health Policy Watch points out that during the pandemic, it is estimated that Khartoum accurately recorded a mere three to six percent of all COVID-19 deaths. Tracking the war’s impact would be highly challenging even if it had not seen most hospitals reduced to rubble.

Yet rigorous attempts have been made to reach a credible estimate of the toll Sudan’s war has wrought. One of the most respected studies was released by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine at the end of 2024. Focusing only on the first fourteen months of the war—from April 2023 to June 2024—and centered exclusively on the greater Khartoum area, it estimated that the capital region had seen some 61,000 deaths in that time period.

This figure represented all-cause deaths, including normal mortality. Removing those baseline fatalities, the excess deaths from this era stood closer to 26,000. That figure represents 26,000 people killed in fourteen months just in Khartoum State, a location that had not yet seen the truly savage fighting playing out elsewhere.

While the researchers refrained from estimating an overall death toll for the wider war, they noted that the true number of fatalities likely exceeded the highest estimates then available. At that time, the highest estimate came from the former U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan, Tom Perriello, who stated in May 2024 that 150,000 may have been killed.

He has since revised this figure sharply upwards, telling the New York Times in September that the death toll had likely crossed 400,000. That would make Sudan’s civil war one of the deadliest conflicts fought in decades.

Historical Context: The Resurgence of the Darfur Genocide

Beyond the sheer scale of the fighting, the Darfur region of Sudan is currently playing host to a systematic genocide. The Rapid Support Forces are a direct descendant of the Janjaweed militias that carried out the original Darfur Genocide in the early years of the 21st century. In its simplest form, that genocide was an attempt by nomadic Arab herder tribes to cleanse Darfur of settled Black African groups like the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa.

While such distinctions might not be immediately visible to outside observers, in Sudan, it was enough to unleash a slaughter. In the 2000s, the Darfur Genocide was international news that commanded global attention. The Holocaust Encyclopedia notes that human rights advocates organized public protests and campaigns in communities around the United States and globally.

Today, as the RSF tries to finish the work its predecessor organizations started, the idea of mass protests against their crimes seems like an impossibility. Few regular citizens internationally even know a genocide is happening in Darfur. The reasons for this are complex and include the Sudan war having the misfortune to run parallel to the highly publicized conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza.

It is also due to events in other parts of Sudan swallowing up the limited media attention dedicated to the crisis. Unlike Sudan’s previous civil wars, the current conflict erupted in the capital, Khartoum, with a showdown between the SAF and RSF. The sight of landmarks in the capital being bombed by fighter jets and shelled by artillery naturally focused scant media attention on the center of the country.

This distraction meant few were watching as the RSF opened a second theater in Darfur, turning the entire region into a zone of horror. It is important to note that the RSF are not the only perpetrators of war crimes in Sudan. Their principal rivals, the SAF, have repeatedly bombarded civilian areas, mass-executed those suspected of working with their enemies, and have been accused by the United States of deploying chemical weapons on the battlefield.

The SAF has withheld food from starving cities, is backed by Iran, and is becoming dangerously intertwined with violent Islamist groups. However, analysts suggest the RSF operates on an entirely different level of brutality. Sudan expert Alex de Waal has described them as “human locusts, stripping cities and countryside bare of all movable resources to sustain their war machine.”

They are also notorious for what Amnesty International calls the “horrific and widespread use of sexual violence.” Prior to El-Fasher, the most notorious example took place in 2023 when the RSF swept through the West Darfur capital of El-Geneina. There, two separate massacres targeting the city’s Masalit population are thought to have killed between 10,000 and 15,000 people, leaving decomposing bodies on the streets for days.

The High Price of Inaction and the Implications of Apathy

Even the lower-bound estimate of 10,000 dead in El-Geneina surpasses the number killed in Srebrenica by Bosnian-Serb forces in 1995—an ethnic massacre now formally recognized by the UN as a genocide. Back in the 1990s, the fall of Srebrenica finally convinced the international community to act. In the 2020s, however, El-Geneina barely raised a shrug from a world heavily focused on Ukraine and Gaza.

While those conflicts command rightful geopolitical attention, a vast attention deficit exists between them and the crisis in Sudan. The siege of Mariupol was correctly positioned as front-page news globally, while the slaughter in El-Geneina remained virtually unknown to the averagely informed observer. The sheer scale of killing in El-Fasher has begun to pierce this veil of obscurity, but this realization arrives far too late.

Had global leaders not chosen willful blindness over the past thirty-one months, tens of thousands of people might still be alive today. When the prospect of international intervention crops up, many policymakers instinctively recoil, burned by the enduring memories of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, intervention in a war like Sudan’s does not necessarily require a massive military deployment.

For all the misery they have unleashed, the RSF remains a relatively low-tech force fought by men in armored 4x4s, utilizing gasoline smuggled from Libya and semi-advanced equipment clandestinely supplied by the United Arab Emirates. If Abu Dhabi were to cut the RSF loose, the war’s trajectory would shift immediately. Washington serves as Abu Dhabi’s primary security guarantor and holds immense diplomatic leverage, including the ability to deploy targeted sanctions against the Dubai-based gold sellers who help smuggle illegally acquired Sudanese bullion onto the international market.

Furthermore, a military intervention—if deemed necessary—would not require unilateral American leadership. In 1995, it took NATO just three weeks of air operations to cripple the Bosnian-Serb army and force peace talks. Despite the capabilities of NATO, European powers, or the African Union, no coalition has seriously floated such a proposal regarding Sudan.

Instead, international institutions remain paralyzed. The UN hesitates without Security Council agreement, while veto-wielding nations theatrically block one another. Following the tragedies of Bosnia and Rwanda, leaders globally vowed never to let such atrocities happen again.

Yet in 2025, the pendulum has swung back toward non-intervention, leaving leaders to offer little more than diplomatic platitudes as a genocidal militia carries out a wave of mass killings. The global community was warned for months of an impending massacre in Sudan and chose to do nothing. This failure of global leadership mirrors the blind eye turned to the Rwandan genocide, ensuring that the ordinary people of El-Fasher are the ones paying the ultimate price.

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