When El-Fasher fell, on October 26 and 27, I was driving between villages scattered across the region of Dar Zaghawa, about a day from the city by car. This semidesert land at the northwest corner of Darfur, marked by rocky hills and sparse acacia trees, is the home of the Zaghawa people, a non-Arab community of herders and farmers. Since the war began in Darfur over two decades ago, Zaghawa fighters have been crucial to the region’s insurgency, and now to its defense; it was mainly Zaghawa rebels and self-defense forces who kept the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—the mostly Arab paramilitary group that has spent the past two and a half years fighting its former mentors in the regular Sudanese army—from invading El-Fasher over eighteen months of siege.
The fall of the city, Darfur’s historical capital, was a shock across Dar Zaghawa. Everyone here has relatives in El-Fasher, civilians or fighters. Every living soul in every village seemed to be gathering in the small shacks of branch and straw where local merchants sell Internet access through Elon Musk’s Starlink. That network has also been accused of guiding killer drones, but now it was the only way to get news.
People were trying to call their relatives and friends in the city on WhatsApp, but none answered. Sometimes an RSF soldier would pick up, a sign that the phone’s owner may have been killed. There was nothing to do but watch the videos the RSF fighters were posting and try to recognize a face among the bodies lying on the ground, or among the crowds of prisoners shepherded by gunmen brandishing whips and calling them falangay, the most popular of several derogatory terms that the RSF’s supporters apply to the non-Arabs mobilized against them. (Many of these terms mean some version of “slave.”)
Before El-Fasher’s fall, it had still been possible to call or message friends in the besieged city and get some news. Since arriving in Dar Zaghawa in early October I had tried to speak daily with my old friends Bakri, an English teacher, and Khalil Daosa, one of the self-defense leaders.1 For a year and a half the defenders had repelled the RSF’s ground attacks. But after the paramilitaries failed to keep control of Sudan’s capital, which the Sudanese army retook in April, they resolved to capture all Darfur instead and intensified their bombing campaign, using artillery and, increasingly, drones.
El-Fasher and Dar Zaghawa—both under the control of the rebel groups and self-defense forces allied with the army—were among the main pockets of resistance. Because that resistance was spearheaded by Zaghawa fighters, the RSF targeted members of the tribe, who also made up a large share of El-Fasher’s hundreds of thousands of remaining civilian inhabitants. On October 2, Khalil reported, the paramilitaries had hit a shelter and a communal kitchen, killing humanitarian workers and other civilians. “There’s bombing on main roads and gathering places for the displaced,” Bakri wrote me that day. “This morning, a shelter and a nearby mosque were targeted,” Khalil texted on October 11. “May God be merciful.” Soon reports emerged that the strike had killed fifty-seven people, including children and the elderly.
Both Khalil and Bakri barely spoke about the hunger, but I knew the food situation in the city was desperate. In a rare message on the subject, on October 6, Bakri told me that most people had been eating ambaz, residue from peanut oil mills usually used to feed livestock. The price of this cheap byproduct had risen, he said, to seven dollars a kilogram: “We became equal to our animals.”
Neither of them lingered on the days spent sheltering in foxholes. “I am now messaging you and bombing is falling on us,” Khalil wrote on October 3. “Our morale is very high, and we have flags of glory,” he messaged a day later. “But yes, it is violent. May God protect the country from it.” Every morning the defenders’ social media feeds buzzed with praise for the resistance and glorified El-Fasher with new nicknames: El-Fasher al-Sumud (“El-Fasher the Resistant”), “Entry with No Return,” “Cemetery of Janjaweed,” “Poison of Janjaweed.” (The RSF partly originates from the Janjaweed militias of the early 2000s, which Sudan’s then ruler, Omar al-Bashir, had used to suppress non-Arab rebels in the region.) The most popular was “the Lion’s Whiskers”—better not touch them.
Before El-Fasher fell, hardly a day would pass in Um Baru, one of the older chieftaincies in Dar Zaghawa, without news that someone from the village had been killed in the besieged city. Again and again the villagers gathered for commemorative ceremonies; on October 12 they mourned a well-known engineer, one of at least eight civilian victims after the RSF bombed a mosque where congregants were preparing for prayer. Five days later they gathered on behalf of another son of the village, killed fighting the RSF in the desert.
That morning a pair of older fighters showed up to pray. Two of the founders of the Darfur rebellion in the early 2000s, they were now leaders in the self-defense forces. Salah “Bob” (no longer sporting the dreadlocks that once gave him his nickname) always wears a uniform and carries an AK rifle. Mohamed Nyere (“Rags”) does so only when the situation looks worrying, and that day he had come prepared: two days ago the RSF had seized the village of Abu Gamra, sixty miles away. As I caught up with them, hundreds of self-defense fighters were rushing south in pickup trucks, on motorbikes, on horses, and on camels to push the RSF back. (They ultimately succeeded.)
Abu Gamra is no less symbolically important than El-Fasher: both Salah and Nyere recall it as the place where the Darfur rebellion began. In the 1980s, during the country’s second civil war, when Salah was eighteen and Nyere in his twenties, they briefly joined the Sudanese army before defecting, unwilling to fight non-Arab rebels in what was then southern Sudan. Instead they joined an earlier Darfuri opposition group that spent the following years discussing whether to take up arms or opt for unarmed political mobilization. Then, in 2001, Arab militias killed several dozen Zaghawa near Abu Gamra. Zaghawa youths started forming self-defense groups, then called “popular camps,” and one day a group of just twenty-five fighters launched a successful attack on Abu Gamra’s police station. It was the founding act of the Darfur rebellion. A year later, once they had amassed a few more recruits, the rebels declared themselves the Darfur Liberation Front.
In April 2003, having renamed themselves the Sudan Liberation Army, they launched a surprise attack on El-Fasher airport with thirteen cars and around three hundred men, destroying two planes and five helicopters. Humiliated, al-Bashir decided to unleash the Janjaweed, who proceeded not simply to chase the rebels but to target their non-Arab communities in a first wave of ethnic violence. The war has not stopped since.
For a decade Dar Zaghawa was one of Sudan’s main rebel-controlled territories. But in 2013, as rebellion spread nationwide, al-Bashir made another consequential decision: he formed a better-equipped, more official version of the Janjaweed called the Rapid Support Forces. Within a few years the RSF had expelled the rebels from Dar Zaghawa; most of them left the country to serve as mercenaries in Libya. But Darfur’s self-defense troops—at first absorbed into the rebel army but long skeptical of its agenda—had taken up guns to protect their homeland, not to fight abroad. “All rebels had gone to Libya and we needed forces to defend our community,” Nyere told me. “We renewed the popular camps under the name of self-defense.”
In 2019 a pro-democracy revolution put an end to al-Bashir’s thirty-year rule. Over the months that followed, as Darfur’s non-Arab communities saw a chance to reclaim their land, the self-defense forces grew larger and stronger. Arab communities felt threatened, and before long conflicts had reemerged across the province, including unprecedented attacks by Arab militias against camps for displaced people in West Darfur. The transitional government neglected the warning signs, even asking the international peacekeepers of the United Nations–African [Union] Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) to withdraw. At that point, Nyere told me, “we lost trust in the international community.” The self-defense fighters had, he said, become “the only force on the ground to face the RSF.”
Looking for allies, the RSF’s leader, Mohamed Hamdan Daglo (known as Hemetti), sought to co-opt the rebels he had once fought. In 2020 he had a crucial part in brokering the Juba Peace Agreement, which allowed the rebels to peacefully return. They settled mostly in North Darfur, where they formed what they called Joint Forces to fill the vacuum left by UNAMID’s departure and protect local communities. When the new war began between the army and the RSF in April 2023, the rebels were hesitant; many non-Arab Darfuris did not exactly mind seeing their two former enemies fight each other in Khartoum. At first they assumed that their already scorched province would be spared.
In fact it took less than two weeks for the war to spread to El-Geneina, the capital of West Darfur. On one side were the RSF and local Arab militias, on the other rebel and self-defense forces belonging to the Masalit, the native non-Arab community. The RSF, needing Darfur’s Arab militias to fight in Khartoum, could hardly hold them back from continuing their old feuds, and soon Arab forces were once again targeting non-Arab civilians. In mid-June, when the RSF seized most of El-Geneina, thousands of Masalit civilians were killed; most of the survivors walked to neighboring Chad.2
In North Darfur, self-defense forces and rebels regretted that they hadn’t supported their Masalit “comrades.” A few days after the massacre, seventy-two traditional chiefs, mostly but not only Zaghawa, met in a Dar Zaghawa village. “We had realized that the RSF were not only fighting the army,” I was told by Omda Saleh, the sixty-five-year-old chief of Um Baru, who chaired the meeting. They decided to side with the army, both because they were convinced that the RSF was targeting non-Arab communities and because they predicted that even a weakened military would ultimately emerge victorious.
They also stepped up recruitment of self-defense fighters. The “popular camps” of the 2000s had dispersed, Omda Saleh told me: “Some had joined the rebels, and others had gone to look for gold in the desert.” Now, he said, “they remobilized.” At the meeting the traditional leaders coined a new name for the self-defense forces: Khashin, the Arabic word for “rough,” which doubles as an approximate acronym for “Popular Forces of Self-Defense.”
Shortly after the meeting the chiefs visited the rebel leaders and stressed that they had to fight the RSF, but for some months the rebels continued to equivocate. “Neutrality” had its advantages: the rebels made money and improved their political leverage by escorting convoys of trade, aid, and displaced civilians between army-controlled eastern Sudan and RSF-controlled Darfur. By late 2023, though, the RSF had taken not just El-Geneina but three of Darfur’s four other state capitals. With only El-Fasher left uncaptured, most rebel leaders announced that they were “abandoning neutrality.”
In El-Fasher and Dar Zaghawa, civilians mobilized into rebel groups and self-defense forces alike. The self-defense units still mostly focused on defending Dar Zaghawa and El-Fasher, but both also sent troops to fight alongside the army in the Nile Valley. It was a risky choice. In April 2025, as the army and its new Darfuri allies took back Khartoum, the RSF retreated to Darfur and turned its focus to El-Fasher. The siege tightened.
Many inhabitants of El-Fasher and the surrounding villages had by then already fled to Zamzam, a camp for the displaced some ten miles to the south, hoping it would offer more safety. By April Zamzam might have been sheltering up to half a million people, making it, according to the UN, the most populous such camp in Sudan.
Some of the displaced people, bracing for an attack, also took up arms. Among them was a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Rim. In 2006, when she was nine, the Janjaweed killed her father, who was fighting with the rebels. She dropped out of school to help her mother, and the family moved to El-Fasher. “I became a fighter because my father had been killed and because of all the bad deeds of the Janjaweed, killing people, raping the women,” she told me when we spoke at a school-turned-shelter in Um Baru. “I was only ten and mostly helped bringing water and food to the injured.”
Most women in the self-defense forces still limit themselves to those support roles, but when she was still a child Rim started going in secret to a house in El-Fasher where rebels offered firearms training. When the war broke out in 2023 she also started volunteering for some of the local NGOs and Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs), then blooming in El-Fasher and throughout Sudan, which tried to fill the gap left by a deeply inadequate flow of international aid by providing food, water, clothes, and health care. In Darfur, where they attracted not just revolutionary youths but wealthy traders and other bigwigs, the ERRs present themselves as apolitical humanitarian bodies, but for volunteers like Rim there was hardly a contradiction between the solidarity effort and armed self-defense. A former member of the resistance committees that spearheaded the 2019 revolution, who now works with an ERR, put it to me succinctly: “Some defend with guns, others with food.”
Rim arrived in Zamzam in 2024, soon after the RSF started besieging El-Fasher. She had already lost a cousin, two uncles, and an aunt; they were driving a wounded man to the city’s only functional hospital when their car was hit by a shell. It was in Zamzam, Rim told me, that “I really became a fighter. As soon as I joined Zamzam, I got a gun. I felt comfortable in that uniform.” (She was wearing it as we spoke.) She became part of a group of sixty-three men and twenty-five women; they called themselves Dugu Juwa, or “Hit Inside.”
Rim liked her busy life in Zamzam. From morning to evening she worked as a volunteer in clinics or schools hosting newly displaced people, “even under shelling.” She distributed food brought at night by smugglers who followed secret routes on donkey carts. But as the siege hardened, supplies diminished. “In the last months,” she said, “there was little humanitarian work, so I spent most of my time with the self-defense.” Her group watched distant RSF fighters and warned children to hide in foxholes when the besiegers started shelling.
One day at the market Rim befriended a twenty-two-year-old fellow ERR volunteer named Hanadi, who soon joined the self-defense forces and won fame on social media after a video made the rounds of her joyfully taunting the RSF, knife in hand. Hanadi was the daughter of a fifty-seven-year-old rebel fighter named al-Nur Daud. Born near Um Baru in the village of Bado Otola—“the gazelles’ pasture,” he told me, only “now there are no more gazelles, because of the war”—al-Nur spent a few years in the army until the 2003 rebel attack on El-Fasher persuaded him to join the insurgency. It was during his three years in the rebellion that Hanadi was born. She grew up in Zamzam, where she trained as a midwife and learned first aid; during the transition her father took up arms again, becoming a Khashin leader.
Pro-RSF social media users responded to the civilian mobilization in defense of Zamzam with predictable hostility, arguing that the camp had “militarized” and implying that its people were therefore legitimate targets. In November 2024 forty-six largely Sudanese civil society organizations signed a statement that echoed this rhetoric, condemning the “massive mobilization of civilians” in Zamzam; Tom Perriello, the US special envoy to Sudan, took note and called for the camp’s “demilitarization.” In December, after the RSF shelled Zamzam, fourteen of the statement’s signatories said that their names had been used without their consent. A counterstatement accused the drafters of forgery and charged them with providing justification for the RSF’s attacks on civilians. Having held together against the al-Bashir regime and the joint 2021 coup by the army and the RSF, Sudanese civil society was coming apart.
On April 11, 2025, Rim went to the market in search of food. While she was out the RSF attacked the part of the camp where her family lived; gunmen entered her house looking for her. She returned to find her sister shot dead.
That night the survivors buried her and other victims, but early the next morning the attack resumed. An uncle fighting in El-Fasher told Rim not to take up arms with her comrades. “Your father has been killed, your sister has been killed,” she recalled him saying. “We want revenge for you, but not for you to die.”
The next day the RSF took control of Zamzam. “We lacked ammunition and didn’t receive support from El-Fasher,” Rim said. “Both Khashin and Joint Forces had a big part in the defense, but the army didn’t do anything. They said no plane could support us and no ammunition and reinforcements could reach the camp.”
Rim and Hanadi both joined the battle. According to witnesses Hanadi went first to a clinic managed by the NGO Relief International, where the RSF had just executed nine aid workers, and found medicine to treat the wounded. Then she went to fight. The attackers were seeking her out: “Any girl they saw,” Rim said, “they asked, ‘Are you Hanadi?’” Whether they recognized her is unclear, but when they crossed paths with her they shot her at close range. “She was always on the front line,” her father told me. During a first attack two months earlier, “people said she stabbed more than ten Janjaweed.” Generally, he said, “I told the women not to join the fight, but she said she was ready to die.”
It was Rim’s first time fighting. “I shot,” she told me, “but I don’t know if I managed to kill any RSF, and if so how many.” Soon her group of twenty men and six women was overwhelmed. The RSF ordered them to lay down their guns, and asked two men about Hanadi. They said they didn’t know her and were immediately killed, as were several of the other men. Then the RSF fighters told the women to take off their uniforms. Those who refused were executed; the others were raped. According to witnesses around half of the three to four hundred self-defense fighters in Zamzam were killed in the attack.
It took Rim and an uncle a week to walk to El-Fasher, hiding in villages on the way. Then, leaving him in the city, she walked three more days to safer camps in Tawila, along a road that has become known as Tariq al-Mawt (“Road of Death”).3 She saw ten bodies by the side of the thoroughfare, likely killed by thirst; most of the travelers here were women and children, the men having either remained in El-Fasher or started walking off the road in the dead of night.
From Tawila, like many other displaced people, Rim was able to buy a ride in the back of a pickup truck to Um Baru. When we spoke there, she was mourning her fallen comrades in Zamzam: of the forty fighters in a WhatsApp group to which she belonged, only four had been connecting since the attack. If she had a chance, she added, she would fight again. Meanwhile she was praying: “God save everyone in El-Fasher.”
By mid-October the news from the besieged city had grown more dire. “Yesterday, the Janjaweed killed large numbers of people and burned some 20 combat vehicles,” Khalil texted on October 18. “Now they are preparing to attack again with artillery…. Suicide and combat drones are bombing intensively throughout the city.” The next day Bakri elaborated:
The RSF had many losses because they always bring child soldiers without training. But we also have losses and injured. If it’s only bullets against bullets, RSF are not strong, but the problem is the bombings, the drones. For two days, I stayed at home. When I say I’m fine I’m only speaking about my health but the situation is not fine. We don’t have enough food.
Every few days groups of self-defense fighters managed to escape from El-Fasher and reach Dar Zaghawa. On October 22 I came across an old acquaintance among them. I first met Mohamed “Bazooka” on the Chad–Sudan border in 2006, when he was a nineteen-year-old member of a rebel group that had just captured an army garrison. Since then, however, he has mostly fought within the self-defense forces, keen to protect his area of Wadi Seyra, a wooded valley that often came under attack from Arab militias.
Jérôme Tubiana
Self-defense forces in training, Dar Zaghawa, Sudan, October 2025
When the war began in 2023 he was in Zamzam, where he started leading a self-defense group called Nyagud (“Grab”). “We didn’t think the RSF would attack Zamzam, since it was a camp for the displaced,” he told me. But when the paramilitaries did invade,
Zamzam wasn’t protected enough. We had only small guns. We were too weak, with no hospital to treat our wounded, and couldn’t even bury the dead. The streets of Zamzam and the road to El-Fasher were full of bodies, mostly women killed in the shelling and shooting, or hit with cars.
After escaping along that road, he joined the self-defense in El-Fasher. Most of his comrades there died in the shelling and bombing. “Some get into foxholes,” he told me, but “others say they’re happy to die and go to paradise. It’s very hot in foxholes, so I preferred to hide behind a wall.” He suffered even more from hunger than from shelling:
When a livestock owner was killed, people could take ambaz from his stocks for free, but otherwise you had to buy it. Some, like me, preferred to die than to eat animal food. We left it for women and children. I know how to survive with little; I grew up in the bush.
People were greeting one another with a new saying: “The sauce has no onions, and there’s no morning tea.”
Three times Bazooka joined groups of ten to fifteen fighters who rode camels at night to Tawila in search of food. It was a dangerous undertaking; the bush routes were dotted with the bodies of unlucky smugglers. On their first trip the RSF killed eight of them, but the survivors succeeded in fulfilling their task. The second time, the RSF killed one of them and shot six of the group’s overloaded camels. By September, when the RSF had finished building a forty-mile-long sand wall around the city, smuggling food had become almost impossible. The RSF’s strategy, initially aimed at emptying El-Fasher of its inhabitants, had shifted toward trapping and starving them.
Bazooka and thirteen of his comrades decided to leave, but by then the city was harder to escape. On their first two attempts the RSF ambushed Bazooka’s group, killing six. Then Bazooka decided to try the city’s notoriously dangerous eastern gate, now sarcastically nicknamed the “Gate of Hope.” He made it, and after two weeks of walking and riding borrowed camels he reached Wadi Seyra, at the southern edge of Dar Zaghawa. His family hardly recognized him. When we spoke there a few days after his arrival, he said that he, too, wanted to go back to fight as soon as his health had recovered. But four days later El-Fasher fell.
In Um Baru, relatives of fighters and civilians trapped in the city expected that new escapees would soon reach Dar Zaghawa, but in the first days no one showed up. Rumors spread that some survivors were on their way, hiding from the drones that the RSF was launching across the area. On October 29 a drone flew over Um Baru for five hours and launched six bombs, killing two and injuring five, mostly civilians. I joined many of the villagers in fleeing to the woods near the village, where we hid under what trees we could find. The next day I left for Chad alongside a good share of Um Baru’s inhabitants, some traveling in cars coated in mud to make them less visible from the sky.
More escapees from El-Fasher reached the closer refuge of Tawila, which over the past two years had already received 600,000 people displaced by the siege. But new arrivals remained oddly few—roughly 10,000 people in the month following the fall of the city, ten times less than after the attack on Zamzam. Médecins San Frontières, with which I work as an adviser, found that 50 percent of three thousand newly arrived adults were suffering from malnutrition, confirming the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification’s judgment that the city was in the grip of famine.4
Between 200,000 and 500,000 people are thought to have stayed in El-Fasher until October 26, according to differing local and international sources. The International Organization for Migration estimates that close to 100,000 fled the city and surrounding villages during and after the RSF takeover, mostly to rural areas nearby, although that figure remains preliminary. Where are all the others? By November 21, according to a Yale University project monitoring the situation using satellite footage, there were “no current patterns of life visible” in the city that were “consistent with civilian presence.” Satellite pictures showed bloodstains on the soil and “at least 150 clusters of objects consistent with human remains,” some actively burning; in some cases objects visible one day seemed to have been buried the next.
One of the first fighters confirmed dead on social media was Khalil Daosa. The RSF, it was reported, killed him when his convoy tried to force its way across the sand wall. Two months after the fall, there was still no news from Bakri, although his family had paid $8,000 to RSF members who claimed, without any proof, that he was in their hands. Such payments have increased, with ransoms now reaching $40,000.
On December 24 the RSF launched another attack on Dar Zaghawa. This time it had more success, capturing Abu Gamra and Um Baru before withdrawing from the latter. Two hundred people were reportedly killed and over seven thousand displaced to the bush. Rim is said to be among the escapees, although since then her WhatsApp has gone dark. The fighting is ongoing, and meanwhile starvation in the area continues to spread. Immediately before the attack a UNICEF survey found that over half of the children under five in and around Um Baru—including some displaced from El-Fasher—were suffering from acute malnutrition.
“I have no news from my family, my uncles, my brothers, my cousins, all of them,” Rim messaged me in our last exchange.
My mother and brother were in El-Fasher, I don’t know if they’re alive or dead. All my friends from ERRs or self-defense died in El-Fasher at the hands of the RSF. All were killed, I swear…. I’m scared, I swear.
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