The RSF’s Capture of El Fasher, Sudan: A Roundup, by Alex Thurston – 29 October 2025

Mass killings in Darfur and a serious shift in the civil war

On October 26, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) captured El Fasher, Sudan after an eighteen-month siege. The city, with an estimated population of around 260,000 (although many have been fleeing), is the capital of North Darfur State and the historic seat of the pre-colonial Sultanate of Darfur.

The RSF is one of two main parties contending in Sudan’s civil war, which began in 2023 after the RSF fell out with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). In March 2025, the SAF drove the RSF out of Sudan’s capital Khartoum, in a major blow to the RSF. The conquest of El Fasher is now, in turn, a profound reversal for the SAF, allowing the RSF to consolidate its control of Darfur.

The implications include mass killings, a de facto partition of Sudan, and the possibility of another advance eastward by the RSF.

At Al Jazeera, Eiad Husham relates the dangerous journey of a civilian activist who fled the city, only to encounter threats, extortion, and exhaustion on the “safe corridor” the RSF had offered to those wanting out.
UNHCR warns about the “spiralling” humanitarian fallout of the city’s capture: “An estimated 26,000 people have fled El Fasher in recent days. Civilians escaped the fighting in terror, navigating armed checkpoints, extortion, arbitrary arrests, detention, looting and harassment, and serious human rights violations as they tried to reach safety. Testimonies from those arriving in the town of Tawila, 50 kilometres from El Fasher, suggest that what was already an alarming humanitarian and protection crisis is spiralling rapidly.”
Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab used satellite imagery, triangulated with press reports, to confirm that mass killings occurred in the first 48 hours of the RSF’s occupation. From the report: “These mass killing events include corroboration of alleged executions around Saudi Hospital and a previously unreported potential mass killing at an RSF detention site at the former Children’s Hospital in eastern El-Fasher. Yale HRL concludes that systematic killing in the vicinity of the earthen wall, hereafter berm, outside the city is continuing.” More than 2,000 people may have already been killed.
On International Crisis Group’s Hold Your Fire! podcast, Shewit Woldemichael and Alan Boswell discuss the violence in El Fasher as well as the relationship between the RSF’s ground offensive and the peace talks under the framework of the “Quad” (the United States, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt).
RFI interviewed Marc Lavergne, emeritus research director of France’s National Centre for Scientific Research, who discussed, among other points, how difficult it will be for the SAF to retake Darfur now, and how humanitarian access to the region may be blocked.

Alex Thurston is an associate professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Cincinnati. He studies Islam and politics in Africa.

This article was first published on Alex Thurston’s Substack.

The RSF’s Capture of El Fasher, Sudan: A Roundup, by Alex Thurston – 29 October 2025

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