El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur in western Sudan, has fallen to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) after a siege that lasted more than a year. The RSF is a powerful paramilitary group that broke away from Sudan’s army in 2023, triggering the civil war. For months the city had been surrounded, cut off from food, medicine and electricity as both the RSF and government forces fought street by street for control.

A new report from Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab says satellite photographs taken in late October show patterns: “consistent with mass killings” in one of the city’s residential districts, Daraja Oula. The images reveal groups of human-sized shapes and dark stains on the ground near RSF vehicles, a sign, analysts said, of possible executions or killings in the open. The area lies close to Al Safiya Mosque, which an RSF drone strike hit in September, killing 78 people during prayers.

The same analysis confirms that the RSF has taken over the Sudanese Armed Forces’ main bases, including its Sixth Division headquarters, artillery brigade and the local airfield. This gives the paramilitary complete control of Darfur, a vast region on Sudan’s western edge bordering Chad, and removes the army’s last foothold west of the Nile. Yale researchers warn that El Fasher’s fall appears to mark: “a systematic and intentional process of ethnic cleansing” against non-Arab communities, which could amount to crimes against humanity.

At the United Nations (UN), Assistant Secretary-General for Africa Martha Pobee called the capture of El Fasher: “a significant shift in the security dynamics,” warning that its consequences for Sudan and the wider region are: “profound.” She told the Security Council that fighting has already spread east into the Kordofan region, the country’s central belt between Darfur and the Nile, where the RSF recently captured the town of Bara. Drone strikes by both the RSF and the army, she said, are now hitting new targets as far away as Blue Nile State, South Kordofan and the capital Khartoum.

South Africa’s posture becomes especially troubling in this context. On 4 January 2024, President Cyril Ramaphosa received the leader of the RSF General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo known by his nom de guerre “Hemedti”, at the Mahlamba Ndlopfu official residence in Pretoria, where the Presidency said he voiced support for dialogue between Sudan’s warring factions. Yet in the weeks preceding that meeting, UN reports had documented mass killings and ethnically targeted violence by the RSF in Darfur and Ardamata, while the United States and United Kingdom had imposed sanctions on RSF commanders for massacres and sexual violence. The decision to host Hemedti with head-of-state protocol revealed a sharp discrepancy between the government’s stated commitment to human rights and its willingness to engage those accused of ethnic cleansing.

The fall of El Fasher changes the geography of the war. Darfur’s long-running ethnic conflict has now merged with Sudan’s nationwide power struggle, and the front line is moving toward the country’s most populated areas. If the fighting reaches the Nile corridor, Sudan’s main agricultural and transport heartland, it will push millions more people into hunger and erase what remains of the government’s control.