A battle rages for a key city in Sudan’s ravaged western region

For more than a year after civil war began in Sudan, el-Fasher held out. City after city in Darfur, a vast western region of which it is the capital, fell to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group fighting to take over all of Sudan. But el-Fasher remained an island of relative stability. Tens of thousands of people fleeing ethnic cleansing and possible genocide elsewhere joined the hundreds of thousands who had settled in the city during the previous Darfur war 20 years ago. While much of Sudan has collapsed into chaos, el-Fasher maintained a fragile peace.

Until now. On May 10th a local truce struck early in the war fell apart. Violence in and around Darfur’s capital has soared. The city’s eastern side is under fiercest assault, according to open-source-intelligence analysts at Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab. Repeated shelling of a camp for displaced people has forced almost half of them to flee. “Missiles every day,” reports a nearby resident by text message. A clinic in the city’s south, which has only one surgeon left, has taken in more than 1,000 wounded patients, says Jérôme Tubiana of Médecins Sans Frontières, a charity. At least 134 have died.

RSF troops under the command of Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo, a Darfuri warlord known as Hemedti, supported by an assortment of militias drawn from local ethnic Arab groups, now surround el-Fasher on all sides. An estimated 2.8m people (including at least 800,000 internal refugees living in camps on the outskirts) are trapped within. Most are from black African ethnic groups, such as the local Zaghawa people. About 30,000 soldiers from the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), the regular army, are holed up in barracks in the centre of the city. With almost all roads blocked, water, food and medicine are running out. “This is a ticking time-bomb,” warns Yasir Yousif Elamin, president of the Sudanese American Physicians’ Association.

Since the civil war erupted in April 2023 in Khartoum, the national capital, almost no corner of the country has been untouched. Millions have been displaced and tens of thousands have been killed. Famine is expected by June; some reckon this could kill more than 2m by the end of September. Yet what happens in el-Fasher in the coming days and weeks will reverberate not just in North Darfur, which is the only state in a western region the size of Spain yet to come under the RSF’s full control, but across Sudan and beyond..

The RSF dreams of spreading its influence across the Horn of Africa and the Sahel. Capturing el-Fasher, the historic capital of the precolonial sultanate of Darfur, would be momentous. It was where the previous devastating civil war began in 2003. And it was where Mr Dagalo and his band of state-sponsored mercenaries, then known as the Janjaweed and now morphed into the RSF, got international notoriety.

Many fear el-Fasher may suffer the same ethnic cleansing as el-Geneina, West Darfur’s capital, when the RSF took it last year. “If it goes full-bore, it’ll be the bloodiest, most brutal battle of the war,” says Tom Perriello, America’s special envoy.

Conquering el-Fasher would enable the RSF to control the key transit route from neighbouring Libya, through which it gets much of its fuel and arms from foreign backers, including the United Arab Emirates (UAE). “Militarily this goes well beyond el-Fasher,” says Kholood Khair of Confluence Advisory, a Sudanese think-tank. “It is much more about the Libyan border.” With North Darfur under its thumb, the RSF would enjoy almost unlimited control of Sudan’s entire western frontier, from Libya in the north-west to Chad and the Central African Republic in the west and South Sudan across the southern border. It would then be easier for the RSF to step up attacks on the SAF and allied groups in their southern and eastern strongholds (see map).

The SAF’s top brass seems to have resigned itself to losing all of Darfur. Having lost most of Khartoum last year, the national government’s headquarters is now Port Sudan on the Red Sea. The SAF’s priority is to reclaim the capital and Gezira state, the country’s breadbasket.

The SAF’s last contingent in el-Fasher is cut off on all sides; emergency supplies have to be airlifted from outside. The RSF’s imminent and possibly genocidal assault on el-Fasher has at least prompted several armed Darfuri groups, which had previously claimed neutrality, to declare allegiance to the SAF. Many of el-Fasher’s residents have responded to the SAF’s calls to arm themselves and fight alongside it. One Western security analyst notes that the SAF, for its part, has been far from faultless, bombing civilians and livestock in areas around el-Fasher that it deems to be sympathetic to the RSF.

Foreign governments are belatedly scrambling to avert a bloodbath. On May 15th America imposed sanctions on two RSF commanders, including one believed to be leading the siege of el-Fasher. It has privately threatened to do the same to Mr Dagalo. Thanks to his control of Sudan’s gold mines, he has to consider the interests of a sprawling multinational business empire. Combined with a rare statement by the UAE urging a ceasefire over el-Fasher, this may have prompted him to delay a full-scale assault on the city. On May 24th the RSF announced it would allow “safe passages” for civilians wishing to leave.

That may be too late. Mr Dagalo, who sees himself as Sudan’s soon-to-be-recognised president, may wish to avoid more damage to his international reputation. But his troops are unlikely to be bothered by that. Nathaniel Raymond, a conflict monitor at Yale University, notes that the RSF and its allies have already attacked “at least 30 primarily Zaghawa communities in six weeks around el-Fasher”, razing homes and expelling residents en masse. If they take the city, they would control about a third of Sudan. “We see them burning houses in el-Fasher already.” ■

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