El-Fasher Responds to the Rapid Support Forces’ Narratives!
By Othman Mirghani
Throughout this war, numerous massacres and violations have taken place—events that shook Sudanese society and stirred anger over the unprecedented suffering endured by a country met far too often with international silence and indifference. Yet the massacres of El-Fasher, and the stories of tragedy and torment the world has seen or heard even a fraction of, were enough to awaken the global conscience, albeit briefly. Experience teaches us that the world’s memory is often weak and short, and that the politics of interest frequently overshadow events and drive them in other directions.
Amid this fleeting moral awakening—and despite overwhelming and damning evidence—some still attempt to cast doubt on victims’ testimonies or spread propaganda to distort the truth. It is hardly surprising that perpetrators would try to erase the traces of their crimes to evade accountability. Sudan has undoubtedly become a battleground for a fierce information and psychological war in which every tool and capability is deployed for deception, sowing despair, and promoting a sense of defeat.
Following the harrowing satellite images released by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab—images showing blood-stained soil, bodies scattered across the compound of the Saudi Hospital in El-Fasher, and the tell-tale signs of mass graves—some attempted to circulate a single old and misleading satellite photo to cast doubt on all the other meticulously documented images.
A few unrelated photos from other places or countries—posted by anonymous accounts claiming they depicted victims in El-Fasher—were also used as part of this disinformation campaign. But the strength of the evidence gathered from multiple independent sources was more than enough to drown out the faint voices seeking to conceal the scale of the atrocities that shocked the world.
In addition to the successive evidence published by the Yale team through satellite analysis—which not only revealed the bodies, blood, and mass graves, but also confirmed premeditation—satellite imagery showed Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fighters blocking alleyways with armed pickup trucks while others carried out door-to-door killings, burning homes and even bodies to wipe away traces of their crimes.
International media outlets independently analyzed the footage and imagery, verifying their authenticity. All of these assessments affirmed the magnitude of the massacres—facts that no public-relations campaign or narrative-shifting effort can erase. The irony is that many RSF fighters documented their own crimes, posting videos online bragging about what they had done.
The RSF’s record speaks for itself—in Khartoum, Gezira, Kordofan, and most notoriously in Darfur, the very region they claim to represent in the name of its “marginalized populations.” Fresh in memory is the genocide committed against the Masalit community after the RSF seized the city of Geneina, capital of West Darfur, shortly after the war erupted in 2023. Around 16,000 Masalit were brutally killed, including Governor Khamis Abakar, whose mutilated body appeared in horrifying videos filmed and circulated by RSF militiamen.
Today, El-Fasher responds—not only through the testimonies of survivors describing the terrifying crimes committed there, from the killing of patients, pregnant women, and medical teams in the last functioning hospital, to identity-based executions, mass rapes of women and girls, and the extortion of families forced to pay exorbitant ransoms to free detained loved ones under threat of being killed on video. El-Fasher responds through another powerful message that deserves reflection: those fleeing the city did not seek refuge in other Darfuri towns like Nyala, Zalingei, or Ed Daein. Instead, many undertook a grueling 10-day journey, according to survivors, to reach the northern city of Al-Dabba in search of safety and peace of mind.
They did not run into the arms of the so-called “Founding Government” declared by the RSF and its allies. They came instead to the embrace of the “State of ’56”—the very state the militia claims to be fighting to dismantle. They poured into the Nile Strip, the very region the RSF has threatened to overrun and annihilate, and found safety under the protection of the national army—an institution the militia and its supporters want dismantled so Sudan may face the fate of other nations that fell into chaos or were pushed once again toward partition.
Through tears, one survivor addressed army and joint-force commanders who visited the new arrivals in Al-Dabba:
“We haven’t tasted the feeling of sleeping on beds for months. It doesn’t matter if we sleep on one today… What matters is that you save those we left behind.”
Saving them requires protection not only from an armed faction, but from any threat to the nation’s very existence. El-Fasher speaks today not for itself alone, but reminds all Sudanese that preserving the state and its institutions is the last line of defense for their humanity.
