The Sudanese city of El Fasher resembles a “massive crime scene”, with large piles of bodies heaped throughout its streets as the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) work to destroy evidence of the scale of their massacre, analysis indicates.
Six weeks after the RSF seized the city, corpses have been gathered together in scores of piles to await burial in mass graves or cremation in huge pits, according to satellite evidence.
With the capital of North Darfur state still sealed off to outsiders, including UN war crimes investigators, the satellite evidence has revealed a network of newly dug incineration and burial pits thought to be for the disposal of large numbers of bodies.
While the final death toll of the massacre remains unclear, British MPs have been briefed that at least 60,000 have been murdered in El Fasher.
RM Block
Sarah Champion, chair of the House of Commons international development select committee, said: “Members received a private briefing on Sudan, at which one of the academics stated, ‘Our low estimate is 60,000 people have been killed there in the last three weeks’.”
As many as 150,000 residents of El Fasher remain unaccounted for since the city fell to the RSF. They are not thought to have left the city and this distressing development comes amid increasingly gloomy speculation about their fate.
Nathaniel Raymond, director of the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, which has been closely analysing satellite images of El Fasher, said the city was eerily empty, with once-bustling markets now desolate.
Yale’s latest analysis suggests marketplaces are now so unused that they are becoming overgrown and that all the livestock appears to have been moved out of the city, which had 1.5 million inhabitants before the war began in April 2023.
“It’s beginning to look a lot like a slaughterhouse,” said Mr Raymond.
No expert or agency has been able to explain the whereabouts of the tens of thousands of residents who have been missing since El Fasher – the army’s last major stronghold in the region – was overrun on October 26th after the RSF’s brutal 500-day starvation siege.
The Guardian has spoken to sources who describe El Fasher residents being held in detention centres in the city, though the numbers still detained are small.
RSF officials had pledged to allow the UN into El Fasher to deliver aid and investigate atrocities, but the city remains out of bounds for humanitarian organisations as well as UN officials.
Aid convoys are understood to be on standby in nearby towns and cities as negotiations for the RSF to give safety guarantees continue. So far the paramilitary group, now in its third year of civil war with Sudan’s armed forces, has refused.
A UN source said: “There needs to be a security assessment before we can plan on sending assistance. Right now, there is no guarantee of safe passage or protection of civilians, aid workers or humanitarian assets.”
[ Mass killings investigation in Sudan will hold culprits to account, vows UNOpens in new window ]
Despite the uncertainty over how many residents might be alive inside El Fasher, the need for help to reach the city is deemed critical, with “staggering” levels of malnutrition reported among those who had escaped. International experts have declared the city to be in famine.
Mr Raymond said some residents, with whom his team had now lost touch, had contacted them within the first two days of the attack alleging that up to 10,000 people had been killed.
Human rights experts now believe El Fasher is likely to be the worst war crime of the Sudanese civil war, which is already characterised by mass atrocities and ethnic cleansing.
The war between the Sudanese army and the RSF erupted in April 2023 when the two forces, then partners in power, clashed over plans to integrate their forces.
Over 32 months of ruinous war, the country has been torn apart, with as many as 400,000 people killed and almost 13 million displaced. The conflict has caused the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis.
Meanwhile, there have been renewed calls for a thorough investigation into an RSF attack on the Zamzam displacement camp 12km south of El Fasher six months earlier.
A new report by Amnesty International documents how the RSF targeted civilians, took hostages and destroyed mosques and schools during a large-scale attack on Zamzam camp. It has called for the RSF to be “investigated for war crimes”.
