NAIROBI — Sudanese paramilitary forces have carried out mass kidnappings after overrunning the western city of El Fashir, holding thousands of civilians for enormous ransoms and executing those who cannot pay, according to survivors, rights groups and relatives of hostages.
The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary besieged El Fashir for a year and a half beginning in 2024 and routinely killed and kidnappedthose who attempted to escape. When the Sudanese army abandoned its final positions in late October and the city fell to the RSF, its fighters seized civilians en masse, including women and children. Prisoners were subjected to torture and deprivation, survivors said, and then forced to call their families to beg for cash.
The Washington Post spoke to nine kidnapping victims, family members and activists for this story. Although individual accounts could not be independently verified, details about methods of attack and the location and treatment of hostages often overlapped with reports from eyewitnesses and rights groups.
A communications blackout in El Fashir makes it difficult to assess the magnitude of the abuses being committed there, but the testimonies that have trickled out paint a horrific picture — of families deliberately crushed by armored vehicles, captured detainees executed on cameraand orphaned children left to wander alone through the desert.
The United Nations has already declared Sudan the site of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with untold thousands killed and 12 million displaced over nearly three years of civil war. The fighting began in April 2023 amid a feud between the head of Sudan’s armed forces and the RSF and has steadily engulfed every corner of the country, including Darfur, a region already synonymous with genocide.
Accounts of atrocities in El Fashir, one of Darfur’s largest cities, have underscored divisions between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, wealthy Persian Gulf monarchies that are both U.S. allies but have competing interests in Sudan.
Saudi Arabia is considered close to the military, while the UAE has been accused of providing military and financial support to the RSF. Emirati leaders have denied the allegations, but weapons sold to the UAE have repeatedly shown up in RSF stockpiles, and bipartisancongressional leaders in Washington have begun to criticize the country by name.
Repeated rounds of U.S. sanctions on both the RSF and the Sudanese military, which has also committed widespread human rights abuses, have done little to stop the killing. Last month, during a visit to the White House, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman appealed to President Donald Trump to help end the conflict. Trump said on Truth Social that he would work with regional partners “to get these atrocities to end.”
In the meantime, vast numbers of survivors are being held at gunpoint.
‘I couldn’t save her’
There were an estimated 270,000 people left in and around El Fashir when it fell on Oct. 27. About 106,000 have escaped the city over the past six weeks, the U.N. says, leaving the rest unaccounted for.
Nathaniel Raymond, head of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, believes tens of thousands of people have already been killed by the RSF. Next week, his lab will release a report mapping at least 140 body piles and documenting large-scale efforts by the paramilitary to hide evidence of the slaughter.
“You have a brigade-size force cleaning up human remains, with no return to pattern of life: activity at water points, markets, on the streets or civilian transport,” Raymond said. “They believe they have to absorb a large amount of human remains as fast as possible before anyone gets into the city.”
One medical worker, 37, told The Post he had stayed in the city throughout the siege, speaking like others in this story on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. A younger brother tried to flee in August but was kidnapped and killed by the RSF, even after their impoverished family paid a ransom to his captors. When fighters overran the city, the medical worker said he fled with a group of about 100 people, but they were quickly captured. About 30 were executed on the spot, he said.
“I told them I was a doctor and that I help everyone, including RSF members,” he said. That saved his life, he believes. The survivors were taken in a convoy to the city of Kutum, a day and a half’s drive away, he recounted.
“They dropped us off in an abandoned house and ordered us to contact our families. They told me, ‘You must convince them to pay 50 million Sudanese pounds, or we will execute you immediately,’” he said. “I contacted my friends because I knew very well that my family didn’t have enough money.”
His friends negotiated the ransom down to 15 million Sudanese pounds — about $25,000 — the medical worker said. As he waited to learn his fate, the fighters brought in more young men from El Fashir and were urged by their superiors to kill at will. He remembered one conversation where their captors were told: “You must kill half of them to pressure the rest into paying.”
The next day, he said, his friends transferred the full amount for his freedom, and he was released near the town of Tawila, where many escapees from El Fashir have found refuge.
Another man, 26, said he had joined a large crowd fleeing westward from the city on Sept. 26. The group was targeted by artillery and drone strikes as they ran, he remembered, and when they reached an earthen berm the RSF had built to wall off the city, armored vehicles opened fire.
“Some tried to escape, but it was hopeless,” he said. “A large number of people were killed. Others pretended to be dead, lying motionless on the ground like us. Then the vehicles began running people over.”
The drivers of the armored vehicles would scan the ground, he said, running over anything that moved. “Around 10 people were crushed, including my sister,” the man said. “I couldn’t save her.”
At every successive roadblock, the man said, more people were shot dead by RSF fighters or attacked by allied Arab militiamen on camels. The crowd he left El Fashir with, which had numbered about 150, had been cut down to about 30, he said.
But the horrors were not yet over.
“I was with my friend and his wife. One of the soldiers tried to take his wife as a servant, but he refused and held her tightly,” he recalled. As a result, he was shot, and his wife lay over him. One of the soldiers said, “Leave them — let them bleed to death.”
The man and about a dozen remaining survivors were blindfolded by RSF fighters and had their hands tied behind their backs, he said. They were taken “like livestock” to Zamzam, formerly a refugee camp, and placed with other prisoners. Then, the man, said, their captors singled out people from ethnic groups associated with militias that had defended El Fashir from the RSF.
Each person was asked to identify their tribe, he said. “If someone said ‘Zaghawa’ or one of the African tribes, they were killed. If someone said they were a soldier, they were also killed,” he said.
The RSF largely draws its forces from Darfur’s Arab tribes. Many men from the Zaghawa ethnic group, and other regional African tribes, were members of former rebel groups that made alliances with the military.
Finally, the man said, he and 10 other captives were taken to a prison cell southwest of El Fashir. They were starved and sometimes forced to roll on thorny branches, he recalled. On the third day, he said, the RSF told them to call their families on a satellite internet connection and ask for 15 million Sudanese pounds.
Two of the prisoners asked for a reduction, saying their relatives couldn’t possibly raise that much. “They were killed immediately,” the man said.
The RSF ordered the rest to call their families. “While making the call, they held a rifle to your head,” the man said. “You would be beaten and humiliated until they responded.”
The man’s family was able to pay his ransom in a series of installments, he said, and he was released with three other survivors at a nearby displacement camp.
A third account highlighted the systematic nature of the extortion scheme. Daqris prison, in the city of Nyala, is filled with thousands of captives taken from El Fashir, according to a person familiar with the situation. Detainees can only be released by the RSF officer who brought them, the person said, and only after a ransom has been paid by friends or family through a mobile money application.
About 60 detainees have been packed into every standard-size cell, the person said, with six people crammed into each solitary confinement room.
“Prisoners are subjected to torture and violence at the hands of guards. Many detainees have died,” the person said. Deaths from abuse and disease, including cholera, have been so frequent that a communal burial ground near the prison was soon full, they added.
In a statementthis week, the Sudan Doctors Network said more than 5,000 civilians were being held in Nyala, including in Daqris prison. Among them were medical staff, politicians and media workers.
Rights groups such as Amnesty International have also reported widespread kidnapping. A survivor told the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) that he too had witnessed men, women and children being run over by armored vehicles during his escape from El Fashir. When he was taken with a group of detainees to an RSF prison, the man said, fighters gave them two hours to transfer about $2,800.
“Only four of us managed to pay,” the man said, in an account shared with The Post by UNFPA. The rest, he said, were executed.
“They killed children, the elderly and women. It was unbearable to watch people die right in front of you, each with a single bullet.”
A 26-year-old woman, kidnapped with her husband and children, told UNFPA her husband didn’t have enough money for all of them.
“He could only afford to pay the ransom for me and our children,” she said. “They killed my husband in front of me.”
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