Sudan’s city of El Fasher resembles a “massive crime scene”, with massive piles of bodies piled up across the streets as the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) work to destroy evidence of the scale of the massacre, the Guardian newspaper reported on Friday.
Six weeks after RSF took over the city, analysis showed that bodies had been collected in mass piles, awaiting burial in mass graves or cremation in giant pits.
The capital of North Darfur state remains closed to outsiders, including United Nations war crimes investigators, but satellite evidence has revealed a network of newly dug crematoriums and burial grounds believed to be used to dispose of large numbers of bodies.
The final death toll of the massacre remains unknown, but British MPs have been told that at least 60,000 people were killed in El Fasher.
As many as 150,000 residents remain missing since the city of El Fasher fell to the RSF. They are not thought to have left the city, and this terrifying development comes amid growing dark speculation about their fate.
Nathaniel Raymond, director of Yale University’s Humanitarian Institute, which closely analyzes satellite images of El Fasher, said the town is eerily deserted and its once-bustling market now deserted.
The market is now so underused and overgrown that it appears all livestock has been removed from the city, which had 1.5 million residents before the war began in April 2023, according to a new analysis from Yale University.
“It’s starting to look like a slaughterhouse,” Raymond said.
Human rights experts now believe El Fasher is likely the worst war crime in Sudan’s civil war, already marked by large-scale brutality and ethnic cleansing.
Thirty-two months of devastating war have torn the country apart, killing as many as 400,000 people and displacing some 13 million people. The conflict has caused the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.
Meanwhile, there are renewed calls for a thorough investigation into the RSF’s attack on the Zamzam concentration camp, seven miles (12 km) south of El Fasher, six months ago.
A new Amnesty International report documents how the RSF targeted civilians, took hostages and destroyed mosques and schools during a major attack on the Zamzam camp. He called on the RSF to carry out an “investigation into war crimes.”