On October 27th, a video went out over social media that showed at least nine men sitting slumped in a row beside a dirt track in the city of El Fasher, in Sudan’s Darfur region. Their thin wrists dangle over their knees. They are exhausted and defeated, held prisoner by long-haired militiamen in camouflage slacks, one of whom brandishes a whip over his head. Another, Alfateh Abdullah Idris, who goes by the nickname Abu Lulu, casually begins firing a Kalashnikov rifle down the row of prisoners. The final man, in a last-second protective reflex, bows his head and crosses his hands over it, but bullets send him flying backward, and the other militiamen join in, firing repeatedly at the dead bodies. Abu Lulu posted the video.

Abu Lulu holds the rank of brigadier general in the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group that broke away from and, since April of 2023, has fought against the Sudanese Armed Forces for control of Sudan, a gold-rich country in northeast Africa. The day the videos were posted, Abu Lulu and the other fighters were celebrating their capture of the city. The siege had lasted five hundred days, more than three times as long as the siege of Stalingrad. The R.S.F. used drones and artillery provided by the United Arab Emirates. In early May, the militia began building a thirty-five-mile-long berm around the city, to prevent food and humanitarian aid from entering; people have survived on grass and animal feed since. There were a million people living in El Fasher when the R.S.F. arrived. It was still home to two hundred and sixty thousand people in late October, when the last members of the government forces began to flee the city, leaving it open to the R.S.F. The group distanced itself from Abu Lulu after the fall of the city, and said that it had arrested him. Al Jazeera reported that he has since been released; he has continued to post on social media.

“The world hasn’t caught up to what a big deal El Fasher is,” Nathaniel Raymond, the executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, told me. Raymond’s team has been tracking atrocities in Sudan using satellite imagery from NASA and commercial sources. The team’s analysis indicates that, since El Fasher fell, the R.S.F. has been conducting mass killings. “In some cases, if someone is shot when they’re running, and you take a picture of it with a satellite, it looks like a ‘C’ or a ‘J,’ because they drop and hit the ground on their knees or on their side in the fetal position,” Raymond told me. The satellite images show a proliferation of “C”s and “J”s, with bloodstains visible from space. “It’s simple math here,” he said. “We are talking tens upon tens of thousands of potential dead in five days.” And the berm built to keep aid out of El Fasher has now made it difficult to escape the city; only thirty-five thousand people are known to have done so. Raymond’s team now refers to El Fasher as the Killbox.

Many of El Fasher’s residents were members of non-Arab Sudanese ethnic minorities, which the R.S.F., whose core is made up of nomadic Arabs, has targeted throughout the war. The Fur and the Zaghawa, who are Black Sudanese, have been first in the R.S.F.’s firing line, though the militia has attacked members of other non-Arab groups, such as the Berti, as well. Speaking on the phone from Cairo, Altahir Hashim, a Sudanese human-rights activist who helped organize a soup kitchen in El Fasher and aid distribution throughout Darfur, told me, “They’re ethnically cleansing. They’re killing, they’re destroying.”

All through the beginning of the last week of October, R.S.F. fighters posted videos of the killings. In one, they shout “God is great” over corpses, flashing victory signs and lofting rifles. In another, they force men to dig their own graves. The R.S.F. is, in many ways, continuing a tradition of mass atrocities. In the early two-thousands, its predecessor organization, a militia known as the Janjaweed, perpetrated a genocide in Darfur that killed some three hundred thousand people. Hashim and his family, who are members of the Zaghawa, were forced to flee to El Fasher. Two of his brothers were killed. “After almost twenty-three years, genocide never ended,” he told me. “The world has just stood there watching, not taking any concrete action.”

Still, humanitarian and foreign-affairs professionals agree that what is happening in Darfur now is on a scale unlike anything seen in the conflict so far. Last week, a video circulated of fighters going room to room at El Fasher’s Saudi Hospital, where some five hundred people are said to have been taking shelter alongside the patients, and executing people. Omer Mahgoub, a Sudanese doctor who serves as a communication officer for the Sudanese American Physicians Association, said that the region is suffering from a man-made famine; pregnant women are among those being forced to make gruelling marches away from their homes in search of relative safety in zones that the R.S.F. does not control; and no one is getting medical care. “It’s a catastrophe,” Mahgoub said. Humanitarian organizations are trying to provide as much aid as possible, but it is nowhere near enough, even though there was plenty of warning. His organization and others had made very clear the risks if a city like El Fasher were to fall. “We have been appealing, we have been calling out, but all of our calls and all of our voices and schemes are just falling onto deaf ears.”

It’s hard to overstate the scale of death in Darfur. “I started my career in the Balkans, and what is happening in El Fasher has echoes of Srebrenica,” Cameron Hudson, a former Africa analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency and chief of staff to President Obama’s special envoy to Sudan, told me, referring to the genocidal killings that spurred U.S. intervention in the Balkans during the nineteen-nineties. “These are people being shot in the back and shot while they’re trying to escape. It’s as bad as it could possibly get.” On Monday, on a call organized by the Sudanese advocacy organization Avaaz, six survivors of the violence in Tawila, a city near the border with Chad, talked about walking on roads littered with dead bodies. Some six hundred and sixty thousand displaced people from across Darfur have congregated in the city, which is controlled by a rebel group that has maintained a strategic posture of nonalignment with both the R.S.F. and the Army. “It cannot be described. It was horrifying,” a woman named Khamisa said of the killing. Another escapee witnessed the mass rape of women and girls by R.S.F. forces. “It is one of the most dangerous things,” she said. “A group attack in front of a crowd. It is an attack in the face of the people.”

Washington has known about the extent of the violence in Sudan for some time, but the Trump Administration has said little about the recent killings. On X, Massad Boulos, President Trump’s senior adviser for Arab and African affairs, and the father-in-law of his daughter Tiffany, pleaded for “RSF leaders to continue to issue and publicly communicate clear orders to their forces to ensure the safety of civilians, humanitarian personnel, and aid operations.” The R.S.F., for its part, issued a statement on Telegram that affirmed “their complete commitment to protecting civilians within El Fasher city after its liberation from the control of the terrorist Islamist movement’s army and its mercenary militias.” (The group often calls the Sudanese Armed Forces “terrorists” because the government it is trying to unseat has ties to Islamist groups, in addition to regional powers like Saudi Arabia and Iran.) Jérôme Tubiana, who is an operational adviser at Doctors Without Borders, told me that it’s wishful thinking to hope that the R.S.F. would protect civilians. “It’s not the first episode of massacre in Darfur during that war, so it seems rather a recurrent pattern than an exception,” Tubiana, who was speaking from North Darfur, told me. He added that people in the town he was in were sleeping outside, under the trees, ready to flee an R.S.F. attack at any time.

The first of the previous massacres in Darfur occurred in the town of El Geneina, in April, 2023; fifteen thousand unarmed civilians were killed. Then, earlier this year, the group conducted more killings in two displaced-persons camps near El Fasher. Raymond, who was working under contract for the U.S. State Department-supported Conflict Observatory program, at Yale, in 2023, said that, after El Geneina, “We told the Biden Administration that we have these photos,” referring to satellite images showing the mass killings. “They were very concerned about them being, quote, ‘securely data controlled.’ ” The U.A.E. was about to enter a major defense partnership with the United States. Late last year, after activists from Human Rights Watch and other organizations highlighted the killings in El Geneina in a series of reports, the Biden Administration publicly declared the R.S.F.’s campaign in Darfur a genocide. A State Department spokesperson would not comment on the specifics in this story for the record, but sent me a written statement after we spoke. “The United States continues to actively and directly engage with Sudanese stakeholders at all levels, with the immediate goals of pressing toward a durable peace and ensuring unhindered humanitarian access to alleviate the suffering of the Sudanese people,” the spokesperson wrote. “Ending wars is a priority for President Trump and the United States remains focused on working with our partners and other stakeholders to resolve the crisis in Sudan.”

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that, according to U.S. intelligence agencies, the Emiratis have ramped up weapons shipments to the R.S.F., even as new evidence of war crimes has come to light. The U.A.E. has an interest in Sudan’s gold, much of which already passes through the Emirates, and the country also, according to several analysts, sees the conflict as an opportunity to flex its regional muscle and outcompete powers like Saudi Arabia and Egypt which have supported the Sudanese Army both diplomatically and militarily. “The U.A.E. support to the R.S.F. is common knowledge among all the diplomats,” Jean-Baptiste Gallopin, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, said. “No one has any doubt that it is happening, and yet the U.A.E. denies it, and none of the Western allies of the U.A.E. is willing to put any public pressure on them to stop.”

“We categorically reject any claims of providing any form of support to either warring party since the onset of the civil war, and condemn atrocities committed by both Port Sudan Authority and RSF,” an unnamed official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, wrote when I contacted the U.A.E. Embassy in Washington, D.C. The official insisted that a recent U.N. report did not show “substantiated” evidence of Emirati involvement. (A leaked draft version of the report, however, mentions “multiple” flights from the U.A.E. to Sudan with weapons supplies.) The official said that the U.A.E. believes there is no “military solution” to the war in Sudan.

There is other evidence to suggest that the U.A.E. has supported the R.S.F. with arms and other matériel. To destroy the displaced-persons camps earlier this year, the R.S.F. used three Chinese-made 155-millimetre AH-4 howitzers—a weapon that is found, according to an investigation from Amnesty International, only in the arsenals of China and the U.A.E. (China has no record of supporting either side in Sudan.) Recently, evidence of Serbian-made mortars, British-made vehicle engines, and Chinese drones have surfaced in the R.S.F.’s arsenal: according to the Times, some of these would have arrived from across the border with Chad, disguised as humanitarian aid; others would have been airfreighted via a U.A.E. airbase in Somalia. And, as in other theatres where the Emiratis have been involved, Colombian mercenaries have been hired to assist in training R.S.F. fighters, some of them teen-agers. (La Silla Vacía, a Colombian newspaper, reported that the Colombians had been hired for jobs such as guarding oil infrastructure in the U.A.E., but were instead sent to Sudan to support the militias.) But the U.S. and Europe have not shown any willingness to stanch the flow of weapons. As Hudson put it, “If we’re going to risk upsetting the U.A.E., it is not going to be over something as ‘inconsequential’ as Sudan.”

Two weeks ago, the Trump Administration invited Algoney Hamdan Dagalo, a major in the R.S.F., to attend ceasefire talks in D.C., seeking to put into place what Boulos called “an urgent humanitarian truce.” (The talks began before the videos of the killings in El Fasher were posted and continued as news of the atrocities started to leak out.) Algoney, who is based in Dubai, is the brother of the R.S.F.’s leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. It was a highly unusual move, because Algoney, who was seen relaxing in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria, on Pennsylvania Avenue, has been personally sanctioned by the U.S. government for his role in the violence; the U.S. Treasury Department said, in 2024, that he is in charge of weapons procurement for the R.S.F.

Hudson, who worked on a peace agreement that ended the first Darfur genocide, told me that last week’s talks were badly conceived. Boulos has too little experience—prior to Trump’s Inauguration, he ran a company that leased trucks and heavy equipment in Nigeria, and he remains its C.E.O.—and there are currently no senior State Department appointees assigned to Africa. In September, Boulos and Tom Fletcher, the United Nations’ undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief, were photographed negotiating aid coming into Sudan via video chat, but the R.S.F. reportedly did not allow it into areas that were not under its control. On Thursday, the R.S.F. announced that it would agree to a humanitarian ceasefire proposed by the U.S. in the wake of the massacre, but the violence looks unlikely to end soon: Sudan’s Army has yet to agree to any pause in the fighting, and, on Friday, there were drone attacks on the Army-controlled capital. In the meantime, Egypt and Turkey agreed to increase the flow of weapons to the Army. Further, by inviting the R.S.F. delegation to attend the talks in D.C., the Administration conferred legitimacy on the group. “You don’t invite Hamas or the Taliban to Washington to negotiate things. You do that in Doha, right?” Hudson said. “That’s why God invented the Middle East, so that we didn’t have to have these war criminals sipping champagne in Washington, D.C.”

Hudson believes that further horrors can be avoided, but only if the U.S. commits to focussing on the issue, and to putting real pressure on the R.S.F. and its allies. Admittedly, Boulos has a wide remit, spanning Africa and the Arab world, but, Hudson said, “He hasn’t even been to Sudan. He hasn’t talked to a single civilian leader in the country.” Meanwhile, in a TikTok Live chat session after the fall of El Fasher, Abu Lulu boasted that he had attained his lifelong goal of killing two thousand people, and that he was now starting to count again from zero.

The fear among humanitarians now is that the R.S.F. is gearing up for an assault on Tawila. As Raymond put it, “What problem are they going to have if they don’t face a consequence, and neither does U.A.E.? What problem are they going to have making a move on Tawila to finish the job?” He added that there is little capacity, and no landing zone, to evacuate the hundreds of international humanitarian staff there, let alone Darfuris. Hashim told me that he and his fellow-volunteers believe an attack on the city is imminent. “There are hundreds of thousands of people there,” he said. And the R.S.F. has “left no options to survive.” Skirmishes on the outskirts were already taking place. “It is happening,” Hashim said. “It’s just a matter of when.” ♦