Mohammed Zakaria had not slept in two days when the news came that el-Fasher, his hometown, had fallen to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.
The Sudanese video journalist and human rights activist had been monitoring the deteriorating situation from Kampala, Uganda, watching as the paramilitary seized the North Darfur governor’s office in the city on Friday, edging closer to taking control of all of it.
He feared the worst.
For Zakaria, the “nightmare” scenario is intensely personal. Searching through social media after the city’s fall, he discovered footage posted on Facebook by RSF soldiers celebrating, standing over dead bodies. He recognised three of his uncles among the dead.
“They are celebrating by killing them,” he said.
He said another uncle’s Facebook profile photo had been changed to an image of an RSF fighter, a chilling message about his possible fate.
“We don’t know where he is … we’re really scared for him,” he said.
The fall of el-Fasher
The city fell to the RSF on Sunday after an 18-month siege, the Sudanese army confirming its withdrawal from what was its last outpost in the Darfur region, held for months by the resolve of fighters holed up there.
The RSF’s capture of el-Fasher gives the paramilitary control over all five state capitals in Darfur, marking a significant turning point in Sudan’s civil war.
El-Fasher endured one of the longest urban sieges in modern warfare this century. The RSF began encircling it in May 2024 and intensified its assaults after being driven from the capital, Khartoum, by the army in March.
What followed its fall has been described by international observers as a massacre on an unprecedented scale, with satellite imagery and social media footage pointing to mass atrocities by RSF fighters, reportedly along ethnic lines.
“We have been talking about this for more than a year. We knew this would happen,” Zakaria told Al Jazeera, his voice breaking.
Sarra Majdoub, a former UN Security Council expert on Sudan, told Al Jazeera observers were warning for months of the city’s fall, like other major urban areas in Darfur that were captured by the RSF, but “they surprisingly held on for a really long time”.
A communications blackout has all but cut off connection from the city, leaving those with loved ones there in a state of anxious uncertainty.
An estimated 260,000 civilians remained trapped in the city when it fell, half of them children.
The Sudan Doctors Network said a “heinous massacre” had taken place in el-Fasher, while the Joint Forces, a coalition of armed groups allied with the Sudanese army, said 2,000 people had been executed. The UN said it documented 1,350 deaths.
Reports of atrocities
The Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab, which monitors the war in Sudan, reported Tuesday that satellite imagery revealed evidence consistent with mass killings, including what seem to be visible pools of blood and clusters of corpses.
Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab, told a media briefing on Tuesday that the killings were “only comparable to Rwanda-style killings”, referring to the 1994 Tutsi genocide in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed in weeks.
As early as October 2, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk warned of the risk of “large-scale, ethnically driven attacks and atrocities”, calling for immediate action to prevent it.
Social media footage verified by Al Jazeera’s Sanad fact-checking agency after the city’s fall showed many instances of RSF fighters carrying out summary executions of civilians. In one video, an RSF commander bragged that he had killed 2,000 people.
In a statement on Monday, the RSF said it was committed to “protecting civilians”.
Majdoub told Al Jazeera that the voyeuristic nature of the videos recorded by RSF fighters was among the “most disturbing elements” of the violence.
She recalled that fighters filming abuses had been seen before in places such as el-Geneina in West Darfur and Gezira state, “but el-Fasher has been different, their violence is more exaggerated.”
“It is very painful,” Zakaria said, “finding videos in social media, and then you find that you know this person, who is a friend, or a distant relative, or uncle, surrounded by RSF fighters.
“This is a reality now for many people”.
He remains unable to locate dozens of friends and relatives.
Among them is Dr Mudathir Ibrahim Suleiman, medical director of Saudi Hospital, whom Zakaria last spoke to early Saturday morning, hours before the RSF took the city.
“He told me he would escape with his father and relatives,” Zakaria said. “Until now, I didn’t hear anything … We found that some doctors reached Tawila, but Dr Mudathir is not among them.”
Darfur’s governor, Minni Minnawi, said on Wednesday the RSF had committed a massacre in the Saudi Hospital, killing 460 people. He also posted footage on X showing a summary execution.
Residents who spoke to Al Jazeera in the weeks before the final offensive described daily bombardments and periodic drone strikes. People dug trenches to hide in at dawn as shelling began, sometimes remaining underground for hours.
The United Nations migration agency reported that more than 26,000 people fled the fighting since Sunday, either heading to the outskirts of the city or attempting the dangerous journey to Tawila, 70km (43.5 miles) to the west.
‘Genocide is happening now’
Zakaria left el-Fasher in June 2024, during the siege, making the perilous journey through South Sudan to Uganda after his house was shelled and he witnessed a deadly attack that killed seven people, including women and children, near his grandfather’s home.
“It was like the hardest decision I have made in my life, to leave my city,” he said.
From Kampala, he continued monitoring the violence and advocating for people.
El-Fasher had appealed for intervention for more than 17 months, he said, while humanitarian organisations operated in Tawila, just three hours away by car.
“The time has passed for actions. The genocide is happening now,” he said.
Zakaria says more than 100 people he knows remain unaccounted for in el-Fasher.
He continues searching social media and calling contacts, hoping for information.
