El Fasher Under Siege: Over Four Hundred Days of Starvation — “The Second Gaza” in the UAE’s Proxy War in Darfur
By Sabah Makki
For more than a year, the city of El Fasher, the last stronghold of state authority in Darfur, has been held hostage under a tight siege imposed by a militia fueled with money and weapons from Abu Dhabi’s coffers. Continuous shelling, systematic starvation, and relentless encirclement have become the city’s grim reality. On August 11, 2025, El Fasher and the Zamzam and Abu Shouk camps endured the 227th assault since the siege began — the fiercest yet. More than 543 combat vehicles were deployed after Zamzam was transformed into a fortified base. Nevertheless, defenders held their ground, inflicting heavy losses on the attackers: over 200 killed, sixteen vehicles destroyed, and more than thirty captured intact. Yet the heaviest toll fell on civilians; in Abu Shouk alone, at least forty were killed and dozens injured.
El Fasher has endured over four hundred days of hunger and bombardment, crafting a saga of resilience and dignity while the world remains silent. This silence lends legitimacy to the massacre and grants the regional sponsors license for further destruction. El Fasher is not merely a domestic conflict zone; it is Africa’s Gaza, a new Leningrad confronting adversity, and a fully realized model of twenty-first-century sieges where international silence becomes an open mandate for more atrocities.
Background: Militia Rebellion Against State and People
The war erupted on April 15, 2023, when the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) — the direct successor of the Janjaweed militias responsible for Darfur’s past atrocities — launched a bloody rebellion against the Sudanese state. This was not an institutional power struggle but a deliberate coup aimed at dismantling the constitutional framework and undermining national sovereignty.
From the outset, guns were directed at civilians: cities, markets, hospitals, and food stores were targeted; looting, mass rape, and systematic killings ensued. In Darfur, these practices echoed ethnic cleansing campaigns of two decades prior, making the past a bitter extension of the present. Without Abu Dhabi’s backing — funding, weapons, drones, and mercenaries — the rebellion would have faltered quickly. With such support, it became a fully-fledged proxy war.
Tight Siege: An Open-Air Prison
Once the commercial, cultural, and administrative heart of Darfur, El Fasher has become an open-air prison. Since April 2024, no food, medicine, or relief has reached the city. Under the siege imposed by a well-armed militia financed by Abu Dhabi, the humanitarian situation in El Fasher reached Phase Five according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) — the peak of famine. Over 825,000 children are trapped; camps have turned into killing fields and open graves; residents feed on livestock fodder as basic life infrastructure collapses.
This hunger is not a byproduct of war but a weapon designed to break the city’s will. Tactics are deliberate: roadblocks, aid convoy interceptions, precise drone strikes, and attacks on health facilities and displacement camps. On January 24–25, 2025, the militia bombed the Saudi Teaching Maternity Hospital, killing around seventy innocents in a crime condemned by the UN and WHO. Even humanitarian corridors became death traps, with militia ambushes on UN aid convoys causing casualties while cholera and preventable epidemics spread, stripping away the final elements of survival.
Recently, the militia attacked Zamzam camp, aided by Colombian mercenaries, turning it into a military garrison. The assault claimed over 782 lives and left more than 1,100 wounded, while unmarked graves filled with thousands who died of starvation or fire. With new displacement exceeding 400,000, one of the most severe humanitarian crises in modern Darfur history has solidified.
“The Second Gaza”: Africa’s Counterpart in Full View of the World
The comparison between El Fasher and Gaza is no exaggeration but a stark warning. Similarities are precise and horrifying:
A total siege choking life’s arteries and cutting off survival.
Civilians trapped with no safe passage, forced to choose between death under siege or risking sniper fire and minefields.
Hospitals leveled, turned to rubble, defying international humanitarian law.
Systematic starvation and epidemics used as instruments of war to dismantle an entire society.
The difference lies not in the scale of tragedy but in its visibility: Gaza headlines international coverage and prompts emergency UN sessions, while El Fasher is left to die in obscurity — slow genocide on a continent often only noticed after graves overflow.
The lesson is clear: tolerance for what happens in El Fasher will repeat elsewhere; silence here is not neutrality but authorization for emerging tyrants and foreign sponsors to consider siege, famine, and massacre as legitimate, unpunished tools of war.
Media Blackout: The Forgotten War
Compounding the crisis is an almost total media blackout, earning Sudan’s conflict the label “the forgotten war.” Journalists have been targeted, ninety percent of media infrastructure destroyed, leaving fewer than seventy reporters in Darfur.
Coverage gaps are staggering. A media survey on March 20, 2025, recorded:
“Ukraine War”: 80 articles
“Gaza War”: 57 articles
“Sudan War”: 23 articles only
Who decides which suffering is visible and which is erased? Here, silence is deliberate policy: restricting access, intimidating journalists, and geopolitical hesitation in confronting the real funders and architects of the siege.
Abu Dhabi: Sponsor, Armorer, Diplomatic Shield
It is no secret that Sudan’s war and the siege of El Fasher are not internal conflicts but external interventions orchestrated by Abu Dhabi through proxies. Evidence includes:
Air bridges from Abu Dhabi to Chad and Libya transporting arms to the militia (UN Experts Report S/2024/65, paras. 41–49)
Advanced Chinese weaponry purchased by Abu Dhabi’s forces appearing in the militia’s hands
Sophisticated drones operating along UAE supply lines
Civilian fronts like the UAE Red Crescent used for logistics, including the “Um Jaris” hospital in Chad near Darfur
French investigations documenting diversion of European ammunition deals to the militia
Major global outlets — Reuters, The Guardian, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal — converge on one fact: all roads lead to Abu Dhabi. Colombian media further revealed the recruitment of hundreds of Colombian mercenaries through UAE-linked companies, deployed in Darfur to fight alongside the militia, train children to kill, and convert displacement camps into fully militarized bases. All lines point to one hand: Abu Dhabi — sponsor, financier, and diplomatic shield.
Call for Justice: Confronting the Perpetrators
Name the Aggressor: The Rapid Support Forces are a terrorist group responsible for war crimes in Sudan, including the El Fasher siege, civilian starvation, and systematic atrocities. The African Union, under the 1999 Algiers Agreement and the Peace and Security Council, must classify them unequivocally, while the UN Security Council should move beyond verbal condemnation to a binding resolution designating the RSF as an international terrorist organization. This would criminalize its funding, recruitment, logistics, and propaganda, opening avenues for judicial proceedings and sanctions against it and its sponsors.
Identify the Patron and End Diplomatic Shielding: Abu Dhabi’s support — weapons, drones, mercenaries, and financial flows — must be publicly and officially acknowledged. The UK, as Security Council penholder for Sudan, Yemen, and Libya, must stop obstructing Sudan’s pursuit of accountability. Continued British protection for Abu Dhabi entrenches impunity. Abu Dhabi, alongside African states identified by UN reports as facilitators of mass atrocities, must face scrutiny rather than be shielded behind closed doors and diplomatic language.
Correct the Narrative: Misleading equivalence between the Sudanese army — the constitutional institution protecting the nation — and a foreign-backed militia must end. Language precision is essential for legal measures and effective sanctions.
To the African Union: It is time to discard the outdated “October 2022 coup” narrative, used politically to cover an externally supported war and absolve its sponsors. The RSF is a terrorist militia committing the gravest crimes against Sudan and its people; Abu Dhabi is its main sponsor. Attempts to whitewash this via political fronts or public figures — including Abdullah Hamdok — who has yet to condemn them explicitly, provide diplomatic cover, making him complicit in concealing and legitimizing the militia’s destructive project in Sudan.
Conclusion
El Fasher is not an ordinary city; it is Africa’s Gaza, the twenty-first-century Leningrad. Its resilience writes new history, and its siege exposes global failure. The bombardment, killings, starvation, and systematic genocide funded directly by Abu Dhabi, under international media blackout, constitute not merely a humanitarian tragedy but a documented war crime.
The pressing question: will the international community remain spectators to an open wound in humanity’s body, or act to stop the crime before graves become history’s only language? The fate of El Fasher is not Sudan’s test alone but a moral and legal trial for the international system: either it proves its ability to protect civilians and deter aggression, or sets a dangerous precedent legitimizing city sieges in future wars.
As Sudanese, we will not lower the flag nor surrender the homeland. We will fight to our last breath. El Fasher will not fall, and Sudan will not be divided. We will eradicate this militia from our land. We will not be defeated nor broken, God willing. This is a battle for existence — and we will prevail.
