El Fasher Suffering in Darfur Continues Unabated in Sudan
Kanako Mita, Sawako Utsumi, and Lee Jay Walker
Modern Tokyo Times
Last year, the United Nations implored the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and their allied Arab militias to end their devastating siege of El Fasher. But their calls have gone unanswered. One year on, the city remains encircled, and the consequences are catastrophic: nearly 40% of young children in El Fasher are now suffering from acute malnutrition, their lives hanging in the balance.
Darfur, once the focus of global outrage during the horrors of the 2003–2005 conflict, is once again drowning in bloodshed. Back then, Arab militias were accused of orchestrating widespread massacres of Black African communities—Fur, Masalit, Zaghawa—leaving hundreds of thousands dead. That same nightmare has returned. Since the outbreak of the current war in Sudan, ethnic violence has surged once more, with Black African civilians across Darfur being systematically targeted in a haunting repeat of history.
The world said “never again.” But in Darfur, the cycle of atrocity continues.
The Guardian reports, “For 549 days El Fasher has been surrounded by fighters from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), who have prevented all humanitarian access entering the city as it attempts to seize the army’s last stronghold in west Sudan.”
Relentless assaults by the RSF have turned El Fasher into a besieged and starving enclave—home to nearly 250,000 people trapped in a tightening noose of violence, hunger, and despair. Food is vanishing. Malnutrition is rampant. And as famine creeps closer by the day, death shadows the city’s every breath.
Yet, amid this unfolding catastrophe, the world remains disturbingly silent. Unlike the global outcry over the wars in Gaza or Ukraine, the mass suffering in El Fasher barely registers. There are no urgent UN summits, no breaking headlines, no pledges of intervention.
And so, the RSF continues its campaign of terror—killing, maiming, and starving civilians with impunity, emboldened by the indifference of a watching world.
UN News reports (earlier this year), “Since April 2023, an estimated 780,000 people have been displaced from El Fasher town and the nearby Zamzam displacement camps, including nearly 500,000 in April and May of this year.”
AFP reports, “The fighting in Darfur, with brutal attacks from the Arab-dominated Rapid Support Forces on ethnic African civilians, is reviving fears of another genocide, back in the early 2000s, when as many as 300,000 people were killed and 2.7 million were driven from their homes, many by government-backed Arab militias.”
Joseph Belliveau (MedGlobal’s executive director) pointedly said: “The 500-day siege of El Fasher has pushed its inhabitants to the edge of survival.”
He continued, “The destruction of homes and health infrastructure has made El Fasher uninhabitable.”
The BBC reports, “Sudan has been ravished by conflict since 2023, after top commanders of the RSF and Sudanese army fell out and a vicious power struggle ensued – creating one of the worst humanitarian crises.”
Since war erupted across Sudan, an estimated 150,000 people have lost their lives—slaughtered, shelled, or starved as the country descends into chaos. The scale of human suffering is staggering: over 12 million people have been uprooted, driven from their homes by relentless violence, persecution, and hunger. It is one of the largest and fastest-growing displacement crises in the world—yet it remains one of the most overlooked.
Catherine Russell (the Executive Director of UNICEF – actively involved in highlighting the crisis in Sudan) said, “Children as young as one being raped by armed men should shock anyone to their core and compel immediate action… Millions of children in Sudan are at risk of rape and other forms of sexual violence, which is being used as a tactic of war. This is an abhorrent violation of international law and could constitute a war crime. It must stop.”
Ethnic cleansing by the RSF is not limited to Darfur; other regions of Sudan are also suffering. In areas such as the Nuba Mountains and South Kordofan, reports of ongoing ethnic massacres highlight the widespread and systematic nature of the violence.
Sudan Tribune reports, “A report by a Sudanese rights group has accused the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and allied militias of committing war crimes and systematic ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains/South Kordofan region, using sexual violence and starvation as weapons of war.”
Tragically, the mass killings and brutalization of Black Africans by Arab militias in Sudan and surrounding regions have failed to ignite the kind of global outrage seen in Gaza or Ukraine. Despite the scale of the atrocities—ethnic cleansing, starvation, mass displacement—the world’s response has been deafeningly muted. The streets that filled with protest for other crises remain quiet, as tens of thousands of lives are extinguished with little international reckoning or sustained attention.
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