El Fasher has fallen, not just as a city but as the last moral threshold for a world that has watched Sudan burn without the slightest urgency for the last 30 months. In the chaos of North Darfur, where a powerful paramilitary group, Rapid Support Forces (RSF), laid siege for seemingly forever, the international community was not caught unaware as satellite imagery, humanitarian reporting and witness testimonies kept warning that the city's collapse meant massacres, starvation, and the final obliteration of civilian safety. Yet, when the RSF finally swept into the last standing city, the reaction was little more than muted expressions of "concern," as if humans living there were merely a footnote in a quarterly diplomatic brief.
Residents who escaped describe artillery shells landing on hospitals and displacement camps, and continuous drone strikes on civilian populations. In one of the most shocking incidents reported by residents and humanitarian workers, a maternity and children's hospital-funded by international donors and considered neutral ground-came under attack, leaving dozens of patients and medical staff dead. Satellite imagery, meanwhile, shows mass graves and bodies lying in open ground around the city, confirming what fleeing families had already said: civilians were hunted where they stood.
Earlier this year, the US had formally determined that the RSF had committed genocide in Darfur and crimes against humanity. Human Rights Watch and other rights organisations have also documented patterns that leave little room for ambiguity-communities targeted on the basis of ethnicity, women abused to destroy social fabric, and entire districts razed. More than eleven million Sudanese are displaced inside their own country, a population roughly equivalent to the entire city of Lahore, emptied and on the move. This is the world's largest displacement crisis, yet it is treated as the world's most distant news item.
It is no secret that the RSF's war machine has been powered by money from gold mining networks and external backers seeking influence across the Red Sea. Sudan has now taken a case to the International Court of Justice, accusing an external state of aiding this obliteration campaign. Even so, while courts hear arguments and diplomats issue statements, an entire generation in Darfur is disappearing.
The world claims lessons were learned from Rwanda. From Srebrenica. From Aleppo. Yet in El Fasher, pleas for humanitarian corridors were met with bureaucratic silence, while humanitarian agencies warned that famine-like conditions were already shaping what could become the deadliest consequence of the war.
History has a knack for recording moments when silence becomes surrender to tyranny. El Fasher will be one of them. *