Investigators said the death toll of the El Fasher massacre is much larger than previously estimated, with some saying at least 60,000 have been killed.
An onslaught of violence ensued after the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces took control of the Sudanese city of El Fasher in Darfur following a monthslong siege. Initial reports placed the death toll in the thousands, but new investigations suggest the massacre could rank as the single greatest mass killing of the 21st century.
“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,’” said Sarah Champion, chairwoman of the United Kingdom’s House of Commons international development select committee.
Up to 150,000 residents of El Fasher are unaccounted for. Yale Humanitarian Research Lab Director Nathaniel Raymond, who has been closely monitoring satellite images of the city, told the Guardian that the city is beginning to look like a “slaughterhouse.”
If the British government figure is even close to true, the El Fasher massacre would dwarf every other massacre in the 21st century. Some estimates considered the Camp Speicher Massacre in Tikrit, Iraq, by ISIS forces, which had a death toll of between roughly 1,100 and 1,800, to be the previous record holder. The United Nations put the number of civilians killed by Russian forces in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, which is considered to be Russia’s worst act of brutality of the war in Ukraine, at just 73-178.
Another way of contextualizing the scale of the bloodletting is the war in Gaza, the bloodiest round of fighting between Israel and Palestinian terrorists since the latter’s war of independence in 1948. Exact casualty figures are hard to find, but the most commonly cited figures are those of the Gaza Health Ministry, which Hamas oversees. It claims over 70,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war and another 171,000 wounded, though it doesn’t distinguish between civilians and fighters.
Israel has denied and criticized these numbers, maintaining that most of those killed have been Hamas fighters or their allies. Roughly 460 Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza during combat operations, while another 1,200 Israelis were killed in Hamas’s initial attack on Oct. 7, 2023.
If half or more of the 150,000 unaccounted-for Sudanese civilians in El Fasher are dead, as is widely believed by many analysts, the RSF would have killed more people in a few weeks than in one of the most destructive wars in recent years, which lasted two years.
El Fasher, which boasted 1.5 million inhabitants at the start of the war in April 2023, is now a ghost town. Once busy marketplaces have been abandoned and are overgrown. Perhaps most disturbingly, the research lab’s satellite images have documented activity consistent with the mass burning of human corpses.
Sources speaking with the Guardian said some civilians are being held in detention centers within the city, though this is understood to be just a fraction of the overall unaccounted-for total.
After a deluge of videos poured out of the fallen city in October, which showed gleeful RSF soldiers murdering POWs and terrified civilians, leadership has cracked down on the sharing of videos. Since then, no on-the-ground evidence has emerged from El Fasher, with access to the city completely restricted to outsiders, including U.N. war crime investigators. Aid convoys are on standby in nearby towns and cities, as the RSF has so far refused to guarantee safe passage.
The RSF has vehemently denied the widespread reports of atrocities. Alaa Nugud, spokesman for the RSF’s political administration TASIS, denounced a supposed fake media campaign around the “Al Fasher liberation” to Sky News last month. He called the 7,000 death toll “totally rubbish.”
“Never happened that TASIS forces or any of its constituents killed civilians based on ethnic background; on the other hand, this is what was done by SAF and the Muslim Brotherhood National Congress Party doctrine during their 39 years of rule,” Nugud said when presented with the investigation’s evidence of massacres.
TOP RSF COMMANDER ESTIMATES AT LEAST 7,000 CIVILIANS KILLED IN EL FASHER MASSACRE IN SUDAN
The isolated nature of Sudan makes casualty figures difficult to come by, but analysts have widely described the situation as the worst humanitarian catastrophe on Earth, much worse than that in Gaza or Ukraine. Two 1/2 years into the war, almost 13 million people have been displaced, as many as 400,000 have been killed, and millions are facing famine.
Several world leaders have turned to President Donald Trump to bring an end to the conflict, a task he has said he is willing to undertake. Peace talks are currently deadlocked, made worse by the Sudanese Armed Forces’s anger over the atrocities committed in El Fasher.