El-Fasher: A Story of Resilience Amid Siege and Hunger
By Othman Mirghani
The world’s attention is fixed on Gaza — and its tragedy undoubtedly deserves the full weight of international focus. But in another corner of our wounded world, the city of El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur in western Sudan, endures the agony of siege and starvation under scant attention from the global community.
Throughout history, siege has been among the cruelest weapons of conflict — cutting cities off from the outside world, starving their inhabitants, and bombarding them in an effort to break their will before breaking their defenses. Against such cruelty, history has recorded the names of cities that stood firm, making patience a weapon of endurance.
Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) perhaps remains the most famous — surviving 872 days of siege, hunger, and cold during World War II without falling to Nazi forces. But Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, actually holds the grim record for the longest siege in modern warfare — 1,425 days of bombardment, sniper fire, and deprivation, with electricity and water supplies constantly cut. Alongside these examples, both ancient and modern history is rich with stories of cities that resisted sieges for varying lengths of time — far too many to recount here.
El-Fasher, after more than a year of unrelenting suffering, now joins this list. Despite siege and hunger, it has repelled 227 attacks by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the latest on Monday, when the city was assaulted from three fronts by large numbers of troops and vehicles. Once again, the army and joint forces fought fiercely and drove the attackers back.
In defeat, the RSF turned its fury on civilians — raiding the Abu Shouk camp for displaced people on the city’s outskirts and massacring 40 residents, wounding 19 others. The aim was to empty the camp through terror and starvation — or outright killing — as had happened at Zamzam camp, which RSF forces repeatedly attacked before overrunning it, amid reports of mass atrocities. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, described the killings as a “stark reminder of the high price of the international community’s silence.”
According to the United Nations, more than 70% of El-Fasher’s population has faced food insecurity for months due to the siege. The RSF blocks aid deliveries, even though the Sudanese government had responded to a call from UN Secretary-General António Guterres and agreed to open the Adré crossing on the Chadian border for humanitarian relief — despite knowing it was also being used to smuggle weapons.
The RSF and its backers have thrown their full weight into the battle for El-Fasher, bringing in mercenaries from Colombia and elsewhere, as if the city’s fall would decisively alter the course of the war in their favor. But this assumption shows a failure to learn the war’s hard lessons.
Khartoum was occupied for nearly two years. Wad Madani, capital of Al-Jazirah State, fell. RSF forces expanded to control around 70% of Sudan’s territory, believing they were close to toppling the state entirely. Yet they awoke from that dream to a nightmare of successive defeats, their control shrinking to Darfur and parts of Kordofan, where they now fight to halt the army’s advance toward their strongholds and its stated goal of reclaiming every inch of Sudanese land.
Knowing they cannot return to Khartoum, Wad Madani, or other areas they once held or aspired to seize, the RSF’s seemingly suicidal insistence on capturing El-Fasher — despite their mounting losses — may reflect pressure from their backers to complete the takeover of Darfur as part of a plan to partition Sudan, after their initial plot to seize the entire country in a sudden coup failed. This thinking also underpins the RSF’s formation of a so-called “parallel government” — a move that has met with a wave of international condemnation, outright rejection, and firm declarations that it will not be recognized.
With each passing day that El-Fasher holds out, the RSF loses more equipment and fighters — some fleeing to other areas, others surrendering to the army — amid growing discontent in their ranks. This strengthens the army’s hand, not just in breaking the siege of El-Fasher, but in reclaiming the nation’s full territory.
El-Fasher’s resilience is writing a new chapter in the long history of cities and peoples who have withstood siege. Just as history has preserved the names of other cities, so too will it remember El-Fasher — defiant against siege, steadfast in the face of hunger, and proof that the spirit of patience and determination does not break easily.
