Sudan: Over 40 dead, 400,000 displaced in RSF's siege on El Fasher
Over 40 people have been killed and approximately 450,000 displaced by the Rapid Support Forces' continued assault on El Fasher, with shelling targeting both civilian areas and refugee camps.
Sudan’s armed forces said that a recent Rapid Support Forces attack on El Fasher, the besieged capital of North Darfur, has killed over 40 people, as the paramilitary group's siege on the city intensifies.
What happened: The RSF launched a fresh artillery attack on El Fasher on Sunday. On Monday, it began shelling the Abu Shouk camp for internally displaced people in the city, according to the Sudanese Armed Forces and the El Fasher Resistance Committees Coordination, a volunteer activist group.
On Sunday, 30 civilians were killed and dozens more were injured, the Resistance Committee said in a post on Facebook. On Tuesday, the 6th Infantry Division of the SAF reported that the death toll had risen to 47 people.
The army also announced on Monday that it had destroyed RSF equipment, including weapons and a weapons platform, north of El Fasher.
This week’s attack is the latest in a series of escalations by the RSF on El Fasher, the only city in Darfur still held by the army. El Fasher has been under an effective siege for months, with supply routes blocked and hundreds of thousands of civilians displaced in and around the city, according to the UN.
On Monday, the UN estimated that renewed RSF attacks on refugee camps on the outskirts of El Fasher, including Abu Shouk and the Zamzam displacement camp — seized by the RSF last Sunday — have forced somewhere between 400,000 and 450,000 people to flee again.
Most of those fleeing, according to the Office of the Humanitarian Coordinator in Sudan, are moving toward remote towns, including Tawila — roughly 60 kilometers (37 miles) west of the Zamzam camp — which saw over 25,000 people arrive from Zamzam between April 12 and April 15, according to a Doctors Without Borders team in the town.
Background: Attacks on El Fasher, while they have persisted for over a year, intensified following a loss for the RSF in Khartoum. The RSF had held the Sudanese capital for nearly the entire course of the war since it began in April 2023, but it was driven out by the SAF in March after weeks of fighting.
Khartoum represented a major victory — both strategic and symbolic — for the SAF. Yet the capture of the city has not brought a cessation of violence. Following the RSF’s announcement in early March that it would establish a parallel government — which it then formally announced on April 15 — many have raised concerns that Sudan could face de facto partitioning. In this scenario, the RSF would control strongholds in Darfur and in parts of southern Sudan, while the SAF would maintain control over the northeast and central regions.
Know more: The now two-year-old conflict in Sudan has resulted in a death toll of up to 150,000, according to data from the US government and Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab. As of April, the UN reported that 13 million people — roughly a quarter of the population — have been displaced. Both the RSF and Sudanese military face accusations of committing atrocities.
