Sudan’s military has confirmed its retreat from the besieged city of El Fasher in Darfur, as human rights groups warned that the paramilitary fighters now in control there are shooting civilians trying to flee.
The fall of the city after an 18-month siege amplified fears that the paramilitary fighters — who also control most of western Sudan’s Darfur region — could embark on a spree of ethnically motivated killings.
El Fasher had become one of the worst battlegrounds of the brutal civil war between Sudan’s military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces that is now stretching into its third year. Its fall to the paramilitaries means that Sudan’s military has now ceded its last major outpost in Darfur, a sprawling region the size of France.
The Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F., redoubled efforts to capture El Fasher in April after they were expelled from the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. After months of escalating attacks with drones and heavy artillery, the R.S.F. captured El Fasher’s main military base on Friday, scattering Sudanese troops and allied Darfuri fighters into residential neighborhoods.
Sudanese military officials initially insisted that their forces were fighting on, but by late Monday they had abandoned the city. In a televised address, Sudan’s military chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, said the retreat was intended “to spare citizens and the rest of the city from destruction.”
By then, accusations were already circulating on social media and from aid groups that R.S.F. fighters were chasing and sometimes killing civilians as they fled the city.
The Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, said satellite images provided evidence of suspected mass killings by R.S.F. troops as the city fell. The images appeared to show bodies clustered near a long earthen berm that R.S.F. troops built around El Fasher over the past five months to completely encircle the city, the Humanitarian Research Lab said in a report published on Monday.
The images were consistent with reports of “executions near the berm, and the killing of people attempting to flee the city by crossing the berm,” it said.
. Human Rights Watch said the images emerging from El Fasher “reveal a horrifying truth: the Rapid Support Forces feel free to carry out mass atrocities with little fear of consequences.”
“The world needs to act to protect civilians from more heinous crimes,” it said.
The R.S.F. began to lay siege to El Fasher in April 2024, a brutal assault that set off a famine in the city, cleared out a camp filled with about 500,000 displaced civilians and launched numerous drone and artillery strikes on hospitals and homes.
By many accounts, a wave of panic and desperation seized El Fasher in the final days of the siege. The R.S.F. had warned that it considered its remaining quarter-million residents to be enemy supporters. Many feared they could be targeted in ethnic violence.
At least 26,000 people fled the city on Oct. 26 and Oct. 27, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Doctors Without Borders said at least 1,000 arrived on Saturday night by truck at a camp where it works 40 miles west of El Fasher. About 130 of those people needed emergency treatment, the organization said, without providing details.
Al Jazeera said that Muammar Ibrahim, a freelance journalist who reported for the news organization, had been detained by the R.S.F. as he tried to flee El Fasher. It cited a video it said showed Mr. Ibrahim crouching on the ground and surrounded by fighters who urged him to say he was being treated well. The network appealed for his release.
Video footage verified by The New York Times showed jubilant R.S.F. fighters riding camels and motorbikes down an empty street in El Fasher over the weekend. Another video shows fighters at the deserted the city’s deserted airport, one of the military’s last strongholds.
Control of El Fasher is a major victory for the paramilitaries, who now rule most of the western and southwestern regions of Sudan. Sudan’s army still controls the east and the capital, Khartoum.
Sudan’s civil war began in April 2023 with a feud between rival generals, and has since ballooned into a sprawling conflict that has drawn in a plethora of Sudanese armed groups and a host of rival foreign powers sponsoring both sides in the fight.
As many as 400,000 people have been killed, by some estimates, and millions have fled their homes. Both the R.S.F. and the Sudanese Army have been accused of war crimes and human rights violations, although only the paramilitaries have been formally accused of genocide by the United States.
The United Nations Human Rights Office said on Monday that it had received multiple reports that the R.S.F. was committing atrocities and executing civilians trying to flee El Fasher.
“The risk of further large-scale, ethnically motivated violations and atrocities in El Fasher is mounting by the day,” the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, said in a statement. The African Union also said that it was deeply concerned “over the escalating violence and reported atrocities in El Fasher.”
Foreign powers are fueling the bloodshed. The United Arab Emirates has supplied drones, artillery and other weapons to the Rapid Support Forces. Turkey, Russia and Iran have supplied or sold weapons to the military, sometimes in exchange for gold.
President Trump’s envoy to Africa, Massad Boulos, has engaged with Emirati diplomats in an effort to broker peace in Sudan. But some Republican leaders in Washington have demanded that firmer actions be taken against the R.S.F.
In a statement on Tuesday, Senator Jim Risch, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, condemned the “horrors” of El Fasher and said the R.S.F. should be officially designated as a foreign terrorist organization.
Earlier warnings by American officials about a potential massacre if El Fasher fell to the R.S.F. were informed by the slaughter in El Geneina, another city in Darfur, in late 2023. Up to 15,000 civilians were killed there after the R.S.F. took control, according to the United Nations. Those killings played a role in the U.S. decision to accuse the R.S.F. leadership of genocide in January.
Sanjana Varghese and Hannah Yi contributed reporting from London.
Declan Walsh is the chief Africa correspondent for The Times based in Nairobi, Kenya. He previously reported from Cairo, covering the Middle East, and Islamabad, Pakistan.
Lynsey Chutel is a Times reporter based in London who covers breaking news in Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
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