When you read about 6,000 people killed in just three days, your brain almost refuses to process it. The numbers are too big, too abstract. But this happened in el-Fasher, Sudan, between October 25 and 27, and the United Nations is calling it exactly what it was: a wave of violence shocking in its scale and brutality.
The Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group that’s been fighting Sudan’s military since April 2023, finally broke through after an 18-month siege of the city. What followed wasn’t just a military victory. It was a rampage.
Bodies Flying Through the Air
The UN report, released Friday, pieces together testimonies from 140 victims and witnesses. What they describe sounds like something from humanity’s darkest chapters. At el-Fasher university’s Rashid dormitory, RSF fighters opened fire with heavy weapons on a crowd of 1,000 people sheltering there. Around 500 died. One witness said bodies were thrown into the air “like a scene out of a horror movie.”
That’s not hyperbole. That’s what happened.
Another 600 people, including 50 children, were executed while taking shelter in university facilities on the same day. The paramilitaries turned a maternity hospital into a killing ground, with at least 460 people dead when they stormed the Saudi Maternity hospital on October 28. They converted a Children’s Hospital into a detention center.
The total death toll from the three-day offensive reached at least 6,000, but the UN warns that’s almost certainly an undercount. More than 1,600 people were killed just trying to flee.
This Wasn’t Random Violence
What makes el-Fasher particularly horrific is how targeted it all was. The RSF and their allied Arab militias, the Janjaweed, went after specific ethnic groups. Women and girls from the African Zaghawa non-Arab tribes were systematically raped and gang-raped, accused of supporting the Sudanese military.
Sexual violence wasn’t just something that happened in the chaos. It was a weapon of war. UN High Commissioner Volker Türk, who visited Sudan last month, said survivors’ testimonies showed how rape “was systematically used as a weapon of war.”
People trying to escape were abducted and held for ransom. The report documents at least 10 detention facilities run by the RSF in el-Fasher alone. Thousands remain missing and unaccounted for.
This pattern isn’t new for the RSF. They did the same thing at the Zamzam camp for displaced people south of el-Fasher. They did it in West Darfur’s city of Geneina and the nearby town of Ardamata in 2023. The playbook stays consistent: siege, attack, ethnically targeted killings, sexual violence, abductions.
A War the World Has Forgotten
Sudan’s conflict started when a power struggle between the RSF’s Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo and the Sudanese military exploded into open fighting across the capital Khartoum and beyond. That was April 2023. We’re now approaching year three, and most people couldn’t tell you it’s happening.
The war has created what the UN calls the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. Parts of the country have been pushed into famine. The International Criminal Court is investigating war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Biden administration accused the RSF of genocide.
And yet el-Fasher barely made headlines when it fell.
Gen. Dagalo has previously acknowledged that his fighters committed abuses, but he disputes the scale. The RSF didn’t respond to requests for comment on the UN report. That’s convenient when the evidence includes satellite imagery, video footage, and 140 witness testimonies all telling the same story.
War Crimes Without Consequences
The UN says there are “reasonable grounds” to believe the RSF and their allied militias committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. Türk called for holding commanders accountable, warning that “persistent impunity fuels continued cycles of violence.”
He’s right, but that accountability seems about as likely as international attention on Sudan improving. The pattern is depressingly familiar: atrocities happen, reports get written, officials make statements, and nothing changes on the ground.
The RSF has been operating with effective impunity throughout this war. They’ve besieged cities, starved populations, targeted ethnic groups, weaponized sexual violence, and turned hospitals into detention centers. The international response has been statements and reports.
Meanwhile, thousands more remain detained in el-Fasher. Thousands more are missing. And the RSF continues to control the city where over 6,000 people were killed in three days while the world looked away, if it looked at all.
