El-Fasher: A stain on the conscience of humanity

The city of El-Fasher has fallen into the hands of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Yet perhaps it is more accurate to say that El-Fasher endured beyond the limits of human resilience — it resisted far longer than any city should. For more than eighteen months, it stood besieged, starving, and bombarded, while the world watched in silence.

To call what happened merely “a fall” would be a distortion. Throughout this ordeal, some framed what is happening in El-Fasher as a humanitarian crisis, others reduced it to a political dispute — both flattening a far graver reality. Few have paused to ask what this collapse of humanity and contempt for law truly signify, as though this descent into chaos has become normal, or as though El-Fasher — and Sudan itself — were the final act of an absurd tragedy.

The city became a living embodiment of the worst horrors of war, and perhaps of atrocities unseen in modern history. The siege began in April 2023, when El-Fasher, already a refuge for thousands who had fled other parts of Darfur overrun by the RSF, was completely cut off from food, medicine, and aid. As the blockade tightened, starvation and disease spread unchecked. In the early days, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator in Sudan, Toby Harward, pointed to two main challenges: the severe shortage of resources to meet growing humanitarian needs, and the near-impossibility of delivering aid amid the warring parties’ intransigence.

On June 13, 2024, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2736 concerning the city. It called, among other things, for the RSF to lift its siege, for external actors to stop providing support, and for all parties to abide by the Jeddah Declaration signed in May 2023. It also urged the international community to close the funding gap in the humanitarian response plan.

It is no surprise that the RSF ignored both the resolution and the Jeddah Declaration. Its forces attacked civilian sites — hospitals, mosques, homes. One by one, El-Fasher’s hospitals collapsed under attack, leaving only a single functioning facility for thousands of residents. Even houses of worship were not spared from drone strikes — one such attack six weeks ago left around eighty dead and twenty wounded. The RSF also raided and burned displaced persons’ camps on the city’s outskirts as though fighting a rival army. In cold blood, they lured civilians out with promises of safe passage — only to kill them or demand ransom from their families.

For over eighteen months, El-Fasher endured an inhuman ordeal. Humanity itself failed the test. International resolutions were flouted. Victims became mere statistics, reported in newsrooms and mentioned by activists in passing.

The RSF’s offer of “safe exit” was a cruel joke. The city was starving. People were reduced to eating animal feed. Two months into the siege, El-Fasher reached phase 4 “emergency” on the scale of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), with some areas already in phase 5 “catastrophe.” More than a year later, famine has likely reached indescribable levels. None of this would have happened without the RSF’s blockade and threats to shoot down any air-dropped aid. In August, it even threatened to use its air-defense systems.

For over eighteen months, El-Fasher endured an inhuman ordeal. Humanity itself failed the test. International resolutions were flouted. Victims became mere statistics, reported in newsrooms and mentioned by activists in passing.

The problem does not lie in the mere existence of a humanitarian crisis in El-Fasher, that crisis cannot be understood in isolation from its political context. Why was El-Fasher besieged in the first place? How did the RSF acquire advanced air-defense systems? What compels mercenaries from distant corners of the world to die on its outskirts? And, more fundamentally, why is there a war raging in Sudan at all?

Some have tried to move away from the humanitarian dimension of the crisis and turn to its political side. Historically, discussions about Sudan and its crises have been viewed through Western lenses that simplify complex realities to make them easier to interpret and understand, then, through that, produce knowledge and scholarship about Sudan and its people. These interpretations have dominated the discourse of anyone wishing to speak about Sudan and its crises.

The war in the South, for instance, was long reduced to a simplistic narrative of an Arab Muslim North fighting an African Christian South. This view became the framework through which everyone approached the southern war, neglecting other dimensions such as external influences and internal disputes among southern groups that cannot be explained through the binary of Arab Muslim versus African Christian. This narrative was reinforced by the fact that many prominent and influential historians had themselves served in Sudan’s colonial administration.

One cannot read what Harold MacMichael wrote in A History of the Arabs in the Sudan without considering his perspective as a member of the British colonial administration. In his bookCitizen and Subject, Mahmood Mamdani cites official correspondence by MacMichael that clearly shows how he employed the Arab–African binary to serve the colonial agenda.

In the current war, again, people make little effort to grasp its depth and intricacy. Ready-made labels dominate the discourse: a war of two generals, a war for power, or a war ignited by Islamists.

When the war in Darfur broke out in 2003, people rushed to describe it as a conflict between Arab and African tribes. The international community and the world ignored any conflict that fell outside this binary. As a result, struggles in which an Arab group was not fighting a non-Arab one fell beyond the scope of research and concern. Even human rights and humanitarian organizations tend to overlook, as much as possible, conflicts that do not fit within this reductionist duality.

In the current war, again, people make little effort to grasp its depth and intricacy. Ready-made labels dominate the discourse: a war of two generals, a war for power, or a war ignited by Islamists. Some orientalist interpretations claim that war is natural for Sudan, given its long history of conflict, as if wars simply arise spontaneously and perpetuate themselves without root causes.

John Young, in his book on the South Sudanese civil war — which erupted in December 2013, two years after the “Arab Muslim North” had vanished from the scene — recounts that the South nonetheless experienced some of the bloodiest fighting. He notes that many humanitarian workers in the South, during the North-South war, held hostile and prejudiced views against northerners, despite never having met a northern or Arab Sudanese person in their lives.

Regarding Darfur after 2003, journalist Julie Flint made a crucial observation in a Small Arms Surveyreport focusing on Arab–Arab conflict in the region. She noted that the majority of casualties between 2006 and 2010 resulted not from battles between the government and rebels, but from infighting among Arab tribes themselves. Yet, she added, these casualty figures and documented confrontations received little attention outside Sudan.

Returning to the current war, whether deliberately or not, many analyses ignore the external dimensions of the conflict by framing it merely as a war between two generals or as internal Sudanese fighting. They overlook the hundreds of flights transporting equipment to the RSF through Libya, Chad, and other routes. Sudanese people have no connection to Colombia, so how is it that hundreds of Colombians are fighting in a so-called “civil war”?

Likewise, the heavy presence of mercenaries from South Sudan cannot simply be explained as part of an internal Sudanese conflict. A UN Panel of Experts report on South Sudan even included an interview with a senior South Sudanese officer who admitted to being in Khartoum to fight alongside the RSF.

The politics of oversimplification

These shallow perspectives that fail to grasp the deeper dimensions of the war not only flatten complex realities but also hinder genuine solutions, instead producing fragmented and temporary fixes. For instance, the world has shown no outrage toward those directly supporting the RSF — militarily, politically, or through media — to be part of the Quad initiative tasked with resolving Sudan’s war. In contrast, the Sudanese government is often criticized for its supposed “intransigence” toward engaging with the same initiative.

The distortion in addressing the crisis goes beyond misidentifying who the mediator is and who the involved parties are — it extends into the very substance of mediation itself.

This alleged intransigence does not stem from a refusal to negotiate altogether, but from the government’s logic that it cannot hold talks under the mediation of those openly backing its opponent. As Finance Minister Jibril Ibrahim once stated, the government does not reject sitting with the RSF’s backers — it only rejects their role as “mediators.” This logic, deemed stubborn by some, is what led Sudan to accept Turkish mediation — which defined the crisis in clearer, more accurate terms.

The distortion in addressing the crisis goes beyond misidentifying who the mediator is and who the involved parties are — it extends into the very substance of mediation itself. During recent Washington talks, for example, the issue of El-Fasher was reportedly off the table — not by the conflicting parties, but by one of the mediators. Strangely, while these negotiations were taking place, planes belonging to that very mediator were delivering military supplies to one of the parties at war.

The absence of a serious, grounded understanding of what is happening in Sudan — and the adoption of reductionist narratives — has produced the distorted reality we now see. One clear symptom of this distortion is the nature of Western figures handling Sudan’s file. In the United States, under President Joe Biden, the portfolio was assigned to Tom Perriello, who spent much of his tenure traveling abroad and only visited Sudan near the end of his term. Perriello had no political background qualifying him to handle an issue of such gravity.

Under Donald Trump’s administration, the file went to Massad Boulos, Trump’s advisor for Middle Eastern affairs — a man with virtually no political experience, known mainly as a businessman whose company barely made $66,000 in annual profits. And perhaps if Boulos were to face a Senate hearing, his performance would be no better — if not worse — than Trump’s nominee for the U.S. ambassadorship to Singapore. Nevertheless, the United States has entrusted such an important file to someone whose main qualification for the position appears to be his support for Trump’s bid to win Muslim and Arab votes in the 2024 U.S. presidential election

Some have compared El-Fasher to Stalingrad, the city that withstood countless German attacks until the tide of war turned. Perhaps the difference lies in hope: Stalingrad knew the Red Army was coming, but in Sudan, where El-Fasher has already fallen and cities like Kadugli, Dilling, and Bara remain under assault by the Rapid Support Forces, people have realized that their “Red Army” — the world’s conscience, both near and far — has long surrendered to indifference and simplification.

In this apathetic world, neighboring countries and peoples must not imitate the West’s tendency to oversimplify issues — and, by doing so, oversimplify solutions. They must make the effort to truly understand the dimensions of what is happening, not because they owe Sudan sympathy or compassion, but because what has unfolded in Sudan could one day unfold elsewhere. If the West’s reductionism can be explained by its detachment from the region and its lack of direct impact, what excuse do we, in the neighboring regions, have for embracing the same oversimplification?