Sudan civil war escalates as RSF forces reportedly push into beleaguered army stronghold of El-Fasher

Johannesburg — A powerful paramilitary force fighting the government in Sudan’s raging two-and-a-half-year civil war claimed over the weekend to have captured the city of El-Fasher, where hundreds of thousands of civilians have been trapped, cut off from the world for months.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the French news agency AFP that the violence around El-Fasher, the last city in the Darfur region not held by the Rapid Support Forces paramilitaries, “represents a terrible escalation in the conflict.”

“The level of suffering that we are witnessing in Sudan is unbearable,” he said. 

Reports circulating on social media on Sunday said RSF forces had taken control of the Sudanese Armed Forces’ 6th Division Headquarters in El-Fasher.

The Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL), which has monitored the war, said it was able to confirm from satellite imagery that RSF forces launched a major attack on El-Fasher on Sunday. 

The HRL said there was “evidence of close-quarter battle” in the city, and that the “activity “may be consistent with reporting that RSF has taken prisoners in and around the [army] airfield.”

The Yale lab said it would continue to monitor satellite imagery for any evidence of “mass atrocities” committed in El-Fasher.

The RSF claimed in a statement to have taken full control of the city, but the army said fighting continued, and independent analysts said the claim could not be verified.

The U.N. has called for civilians trapped inside the Sudanese city – of whom there are believed to be some 250,000 – to be allowed to leave. U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher called for a ceasefire in the town to allow people to flee. 

The RSF forces have encircled El-Fasher for weeks, building an earthen berm around the city to stop supplies getting in and people getting out. It is the last remaining stronghold of the Sudanese army in the Darfur region, and if the RSF does fully capture El-Fasher, it would leave the group in control of all five of Darfur’s states. 

Analysts have warned that the RSF has indicated it would move to formally partition Sudan and set up a parallel government in the areas under its control.

Unverified images posted on social media appeared to show RSF fighters walking among bodies and injured civilians as fighters celebrated inside El-Fasher on Sunday.

Fighting has raged around El-Fasher for 18 months, leaving tens of thousands of trapped residents starved of every necessity from food to medical supplies, and with little means of communicating with the outside world. From the few witness accounts to emerge, it’s been clear that drone and artillery strikes have become a part of daily life as the army and RSF battled over the city.

Sudan’s civil war broke out in April 2023, when a power sharing agreement between commanders of the army and the RSF collapsed over plans to combine their forces. Fighting has raged ever since, and both sides have been accused of suspected war crimes as the fighting fuels what the U.N. considers the world’s single largest humanitarian crisis.