With dozens of bodies scattered around him, against a backdrop of burning vehicles, a sole survivor begged for his life.
A Sudanese paramilitary commander known as Abu Lulu leaned over the man, listening to his desperate pleas. But he had little time for them.
Standing up, Abu Lulu ignored the man’s imprecations, casually shot him dead, and kept walking.
The execution, depicted in a video circulating online and verified by The New York Times, was one of numerous scenes of violence to emerge from the besieged Sudanese city of El Fasher since it was captured by paramilitaries last weekend.
Videos and witness accounts show trenches filled with bodies, and fighters with the paramilitary force — the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F. — hunting down civilians as they flee.
The images of these and other atrocities have set off global outrage and stoked fears that the region of Darfur is plunging, once again, into a cycle of genocidal violence of the kind that made the Sudanese region a focus of global politics two decades ago.
At the United Nations and in Western capitals, officials issued statements on Thursday condemning the R.S.F., which has been battling Sudan’s military since the country plunged into a ruinous civil war over two years ago, and recently declared its own parallel government.
Some called for punitive measures against its main foreign backer, the United Arab Emirates.
In Washington, congressional leaders renewed calls for a pause on arms sales to the Emirates until it stops arming the paramilitary. In London, the government faced questions about reports that British-made military equipment was being used by the R.S.F.
At an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council, Tom Fletcher, the top U.N. humanitarian official, criticized member states for letting the crisis reach this point.
“I have found the limits of my ability and the U.N.’s authority,” he said, calling on member states to “stop arming” the R.S.F.’s campaign, without naming the country responsible, widely assumed to be the Emirates. (The Emirates has denied backing either side in the conflict.)
Responding to mounting outrage, the R.S.F. leader, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, made a speech shared on social media in which he conceded that his troops had committed some abuses, and pledged to hold responsible “any soldier or officer who committed a crime.”
The R.S.F. later said it had arrested Abu Lulu, the commander who had been filmed shooting the injured man.
But the paramilitary denied a shocking allegation from the World Health Organization, which said that 460 people had been killed at a hospital in El Fasher on Tuesday.
Although the W.H.O. did not specify who had carried out the killings, they had occurred days after the R.S.F. seized El Fasher, breaking an 18-month siege that reduced starving residents to eating animal feed.
In a statement, the R.S.F. said it “categorically denied” those allegations, which it said were part of an “intensive propaganda campaign” with “no connection to reality.” On Thursday, the group released a video purporting to show the hospital, saying it countered claims of the attack. In the footage, not many patients can be seen in the disheveled building.
Mr. Fletcher’s remarks added to a pile of U.N. reports over the past 18 months about what is widely considered to be the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis — a civil war that has forced 12 million people from their homes, spread famine across the country and killed as many as 400,000 people, by some estimates.
That crisis has only intensified in El Fasher in recent days. Communications with the city were still largely cut off on Thursday. But a stream of videos, filmed by R.S.F. fighters themselves and verified by The Times and the Centre for Information Resilience, a nonprofit that documents potential war crimes, opened a window into the unfolding carnage.
In one video, fighters stepped over bodies scattered in a room in the city’s university. A survivor can be seen raising an arm, apparently calling for help, before a fighter shoots him dead.
An estimated 260,000 civilians were trapped in the city when R.S.F. troops captured the main army base on Sunday. Since then, thousands have fled. But aid groups said Thursday that only a trickle appeared to have made it to safety, and many of those who did reported passing down a road littered with the bodies of others who had died, or been killed, along the way.
Just 5,000 people had reached Tawila, about 40 miles west of El Fasher, said Mathilde Vu of the Norwegian Refugee Council, which provides aid there. “People who arrived talk about dead bodies on the road and being stopped multiple times before reaching,” she said. “Men are being separated and detained.”
The journey, the group said in a statement on Thursday, is riddled with “extortion, arbitrary arrests, detention, looting, sexual violence and harassment.”
Those who survive the trip are directed to overflowing camps that already hold hundreds of thousands of people, where disease outbreaks are common and there is an extreme shortage of food, water and shelters.
“They are safe from shelling and attacks, but not from the suffering,” Ms. Vu said.
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.
Sanjana Varghese is a reporter on The Times’s Visual Investigations team, specializing in the use of advanced digital techniques to analyze visual evidence.
Pranav Baskar is an international reporter and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
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