Pay up or be executed

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By Ahmed Gouja, Philip Kleinfeld, and a journalist in Tawila

El Fasher survivors speak of kidnappings and mass killings.

Ibrahim had returned to El Fasher to smuggle food for his starving family when the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces seized his city last week having besieged it for over 18 months. He quickly found himself trapped in a killing field.

As he tried to escape, RSF vehicles ploughed through crowds, knocking people down and running over bodies. Ibrahim was then captured with hundreds of others and taken to a nearby reservoir. He said most were executed in the days that followed.

Ibrahim’s story is one of nearly a dozen collected by The New Humanitarian from survivors who have escaped in the past few days from El Fasher, one of the largest cities in Sudan’s western Darfur region, and now conquered by a brutal militia.

A flood of videos – most posted by RSF fighters with access to the internet – offered a terrifying glimpse of what unfolded when the city fell on 26 October, revealing mass killings that are among the worst seen in Sudan’s two-and-a-half-year war.

And yet interviews with survivors like Ibrahim (not his real name) show the videos reveal only part of the horror: Countless killings went unrecorded, while abductions and ransom demands from escapees have soared as the RSF monetises its brutality.

“My husband was killed at the start of the war, and now my eldest has been abducted by the RSF,” said a woman who escaped El Fasher last week. She said the son – her main support as she battles kidney disease – was taken as they fled.

Humanitarian groups have cautioned that only a fraction of the estimated 260,000 people who were inside El Fasher when the city fell have escaped so far, raising deep fears about what is happening to them amid a near-total communications blackout.

Sources with limited information from inside the city said the RSF – backed since the start of the conflict by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – has been clearing bodies to erase evidence of mass killings, and is likely preventing residents from leaving.

The group has been releasing propaganda videos showing it handing out aid and medicine to residents, but internal RSF sources hinted at continuing abuses, saying male residents of the city were being systematically searched and separated.

“We have not seen many people leaving, and that is the main worry that we have now,” said Arjan Hehenkamp, the Darfur crisis lead for the International Rescue Committee (IRC). “A trickle of people here and there are coming through, but that is it.”

Mass executions

The RSF massacres followed a more than 500-day siege imposed to dislodge the national army and allied groups from El Fasher, the last major city in the group’s Darfur stronghold that it had not captured since it began fighting the military in 2023.

As hundreds of thousands fled the city and surrounding camps during the siege, the RSF branded those who stayed behind as collaborators of its enemies – even though most were facing famine conditions and unable to afford the journey out.

The RSF’s record of atrocities since the war began made the massacre predictable, yet warnings were ignored, and the group’s patron – the UAE – faced little censure as it poured arms, including those it got from Western nations, into the group’s hands.

The videos last week showed scores of people executed in a university building; and dozens more killed in scrubland, and in a trench the RSF dug to encircle El Fasher. The World Health Organization reported nearly 500 more deaths at a hospital.

Ibrahim said the killings that he witnessed were not among those uploaded online, but that the evidence would be there if investigators were able to get to the water reservoir and nearby trench where the killings took place.

He said that when his group of eight arrived in El Fasher, those caught with supplies in their hands were immediately executed by the RSF. Women and children trying to flee the city were deliberately run over by RSF drivers, he added.

Ibrahim said he was then taken to a detention centre, where people drank urine from extreme thirst and hundreds were executed over three days. He said he survived only because an RSF soldier recognised him – they had studied together in Khartoum.

“We are just civilians,” Ibrahim told The New Humanitarian, still deeply traumatised by what he had experienced. He described the crimes carried out by the RSF as “not befitting humanity”.

Others who spoke to The New Humanitarian described being held by the RSF in a village called Garni, just northwest of El Fasher, where they said men and boys were being screened and interrogated.

Many described the RSF going through people’s phones, searching for photos of the army or allied armed groups, and questioning why they had not left the city earlier – falsely implying that those who remained were collaborators.

The woman with kidney failure said she had asked the RSF at Garni to release her eldest son, but has received “no news from him”. He is “the only source of livelihood and food” for her family, she added.

A cook who had worked at a hospital in El Fasher – “working and sacrificing for the country”, she said – reported that her brother and brother-in-law were also taken at Garni, and that she doesn’t know if they’re alive or dead.

Elsewhere along her journey, she said she had her phone and money stolen, and was beaten and insulted as “dirty”. Her sister was also strip-searched in front of her. “We left with nothing. Even water and food were thrown to the ground,” she said.

Others described being called slaves and subjected to ethnic slurs by RSF soldiers, most of whom are from Darfur’s Arab groups. They descend from the Janjaweed militias that carried out genocidal crimes against Darfuri non-Arabs in the 2000s.

Most of the remaining residents of El Fasher are from non-Arab groups, as were the militias and popular resistance forces that helped the army hold the city. Many feared that the RSF would engage in ethnically targeted reprisals once it took control.

Organised kidnappings

The New Humanitarian also spoke to several individuals who had been detained for ransom outside El Fasher, whose fall to the RSF cements Sudan’s de facto partition between paramilitary areas in the west and army-held areas in the centre and east.

The sources said their families were forced to pay thousands – and in some cases tens of thousands – of dollars for the RSF to release them and transport them to safer areas.

Some sources shared audio recordings and WhatsApp messages from the kidnappers – whose names and faces were documented – that had originally been sent to their family members.

RSF ransom and trafficking networks have operated along the escape routes from El Fasher for some time – one of many ways the group and allied militias profit from civilian suffering – but the practice has become a massive business in recent days.

A man in his mid-20s said his family split up in different directions when leaving El Fasher – hoping to maximise the chance that at least one would survive – but that they were all kidnapped in different places by the RSF and affiliated groups.

The man said his family paid nearly $1,500 for his release, and that more than 40 others were held at the same checkpoint, all threatened with death if their ransoms were not paid. After his release, he was driven to a nearby town, shaken and tired.

The man’s uncle, who was also detained, said his kidnappers demanded more than $3,000. He said he was initially beaten and humiliated until they learned that his family would pay.

He said he had been held with 12 others, including young boys, while a separate group of women and girls were kept nearby. Those who could not pay were taken away – he does not know whether they survived.

A third individual, trying to leave along a different route, said three members of his group were taken away after the RSF intercepted them. He said he heard gunfire and never saw them again.

The RSF accused the remaining captives of spying for the army and allied armed groups, interrogating them about why they had stayed in El Fasher. The source said he was released only after paying thousands of dollars.

One woman described being kidnapped for ransom multiple times along the route from El Fasher to Tawila – the main town where people from the city and surrounding displacement camps have been seeking refuge over recent months.

“In one place, they took our radio and 500,000 Sudanese pounds ($800) and in another they took 100,000 ($170) and asked us, ‘Are you in the army? Why didn’t you leave?’,” she said. “We replied [that] we are civilians, we don’t have money, and that we rely on God.”

Another man said he made the same journey from El Fasher to Tawila without being looted, but only by travelling on foot at night. Along the way, which took him three days to complete, he said he passed groups of women and children too exhausted to continue.

A “truly catastrophic” situation

While the situation inside El Fasher remains largely unknown, an RSF propaganda campaign is currently in full swing, with members of the group filming themselves distributing aid and speaking to residents to project calm and control.

Some relatives with family members inside El Fasher told The New Humanitarian they have seen their loved ones appear in RSF-produced videos, declaring that they are safe and that the situation is normal.

An RSF source inside the city said demining specialists had been called and that civilians were being provided with food, medicine, and other supplies, adding that “there is no reason for them to run away”.

But the same source described efforts to “separate civilians from fighters” at one of the city’s main displacement sites – suggesting that interrogations and abuses are continuing.

The UN’s emergency aid coordination agency, OCHA, said relief groups are still being blocked from accessing the city, even as the RSF-run Darfur administration has called on aid groups to “expedite” assistance.

Some relief workers who spoke to The New Humanitarian said they were wary of the RSF’s calls to humanitarian organisations, noting that the group had denied civilians aid for more than 500 days.

They fear that the RSF now seeks to use international aid as a tool to help keep civilians in place and to lend itself a veneer of legitimacy – both locally and abroad – as its reputation degrades even further.

Those who have managed to reach Tawila are facing desperate conditions too. More than 650,000 people are already sheltering there – most displaced in earlier waves from El Fasher and surrounding camps.

The main areas where people are sheltering outside the town now stretch for many kilometres across local farmland, creating tensions and worsening food insecurity among an otherwise generous host population.

The international humanitarian response has been weak: a result of massive funding cuts by the US and other governments, and restrictions imposed by the army-led de facto authority that sharply limit the UN’s operations in RSF-held areas.

Hehenkamp, of IRC, said aid groups have struggled to bring in drilling equipment to expand access to water, leaving people dependent on existing wells that were never designed to support the massive number now in the area.

He said plans to “scale up” the humanitarian response in Tawila have fallen far short. “It is nowhere near what it needs to be to cover even the most basic emergency needs,” he said.

Adam Mohammed Adam, a member of Tawila’s emergency response room – the name given to the network of mutual aid groups set up across the country – described the situation in the town as “truly catastrophic”.

He said 450 people had been admitted to Tawila hospital since last week, including survivors of sexual violence, people with gunshot wounds, and others with severe malnutrition.

“They need food urgently because they lost everything and were living in a state of famine,” he said. “All of them need shelter materials… because people have lost all the means of life.”

The cook who worked at the hospital in El Fasher before escaping last week said those who survived RSF gunfire “may not survive hunger and thirst”. “We lost so much: lives, jobs, professions – everything,” she said. “We hope for better days.”

This article was first published by the New Humanitarian