Satellite images show Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are violating international law by deliberately targeting civilians in the besieged city of El Fasher. This should be considered a war crime, a Yale University research team said.
Caitlin Howarth, from the university’s Humanitarian Studies Laboratory (HRL), told the BBC: “We are seeing a whole new cemeteries growing, with more than 60 new graves being built in just two weeks.”
With RSF recently completing 57km (35 miles) of earthen walls around the city, people are now completely trapped with no possibility of escape.
Desperate residents in the army’s last stronghold in Darfur said they were running out of food.
“There is nothing left to eat today. Our food supply has been exhausted,” the El Fasher Resistance Committee, made up of local citizens and activists, said in a statement on Tuesday.
“Even the alternatives that people clung to for survival have disappeared.” I am referring to ‘ambaj’, which is the residue left after extracting groundnut oil, which is usually fed to animals.
Sudan entered civil war in April 2023 after a vicious struggle for power broke out between the military and RSF.
Since the conflict broke out, RSF fighters and allied Arab militias in Darfur have been accused of targeting people from non-Arab ethnic groups.
El-Fasher was under siege 18 months ago and communications have been cut off, making it difficult to verify information from the city as only those with satellite internet connections can reach it.
The Resistance Committee has warned that time is running out for the estimated 300,000 people still living in the city.
“We write, we scream, we plead, but our words seem to ring hollow,” he said. “There are no relief planes, no humanitarian airlifts, no truly international movements and no efforts on the ground to break the siege.”
Traders in the city told the Sudan Tribune news website that community kitchens had stopped providing meals to people seeking shelter.
They added that all food items were also completely gone from stores that used to sell smuggled stock at exorbitant prices.
Ms Howarth told the BBC’s Newsday program that over the past few months civilians have been driven out by the RSF from concentration camps around El Fasher and other areas, including through arson and, in some cases, what appears to be “house-to-house clearing operations”.
They were now the last refuge in an “increasingly small area,” concentrated in mosque shelters near hospitals and markets, areas that were under repeated bombing.
Mr Howarth said satellite images showed “burn scars” on certain buildings which could have had “horrific” consequences.
“We had munitions deployed in the air. This could have been a combination of drones and artillery that came through the roof, exploded on impact and then set everything within the structure ablaze,” she explained, while sources on the ground said people inside were “burned alive.”
Yale HRL researchers found that over the past month, at least 174 people have been killed and at least 123 injured, including attacks on two shelters – one of them a communal kitchen, two mosques, a hospital and a market.
“These incidents only include those that HRL has corroborated through remote sensing, open source documentation, or a combination of both methods and are likely an undercount,” the report said.
“These acts are prima facie war crimes and could rise to the level of crimes against humanity.”
Researchers also confirmed that between September 26 and October 10, at least 60 burial mounds were created in a new cemetery near Daraja Oula. The area is one of the only areas still under the control of the military and its allies, a local armed group known as the Joint Forces.
Mr Howarth said there were currently only four RSF-controlled exits out of the city.
“These hostilities must cease immediately so that civilians can immediately and safely leave El Fasher without risk of harassment, taxation or extrajudicial execution,” she said.
“And access to aid and humanitarian assistance must be allowed fully without the threat of bombing or attack.”
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