Satellite images and videos capture atrocities unfolding in Sudan

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

As accounts of mass slaughter emerged following the takeover of El Fasher by paramilitary forces in Sudan in recent days, satellites captured ominous red patches on the city’s streets.

The sight of what appeared to be blood has added to growing evidence of atrocities committed by the Rapid Support Forces, who over-ran the city in Darfur this week after an 18-month siege.

Fighters from the RSF, which the US has previously accused of committing genocide, have allegedly gone on to slaughter hundreds of people, in some cases filming themselves carrying out executions.

This included the reported massacre of 460 patients and their families at El Fasher’s Saudi Maternity Hospital and reports of ethnically motivated killings that the World Health Organization said were reminiscent of the “darkest days” of the Darfur rebellion more than two decades ago.

The siege of El Fasher became a pivotal battle in the current civil war, which has since 2023 pitted the RSF against its former allies in the Sudanese Armed Forces.

The conflict has provoked the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, according to the UN, displacing more than 14mn people and claiming at least 150,000 lives.

RSF fighters — who had cut off El Fasher with an earthen wall to prevent food getting in and control people getting out — captured the city’s airport and military base on Sunday, ousting the SAF and its allies from their last remaining stronghold in Darfur.

RSF fighters have posted numerous videos since recording what appear to be war crimes carried out within the city, and as people fled into the surrounding scrub.

In several of these, Al-Fatih Abdallah Idris, an RSF commander whose nom de guerre is Abu Lulu, humiliates and then executes young men captured in recent days.

The same commander had previously been identified by human rights groups committing atrocities.

The RSF, which grew out of the primarily Arab Janjaweed militia, has long been accused of committing atrocities against the region’s Black African populations — for whom El Fasher had in many cases become a last refuge.

Graphic footage circulating online shows militiamen in the Saudi hospital, shooting a patient in a room already full of bodies.

“They coldbloodedly killed everyone they found inside the Saudi hospital, including patients, their companions, and anyone else present in the wards,” a spokesperson for the Sudan Doctors Network said, adding that the RSF had transformed hospitals “into human slaughterhouses”.

The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL), which has been collecting evidence of war crimes during the siege of El Fasher, released satellite analysis this week showing clusters of what appeared to be human bodies in the hospital grounds.

There, and elsewhere in El Fasher, the HRL research showed red discolouration on the earth that appeared to be pools of blood.

The parallel government set up in Darfur by RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, said it was verifying the veracity of the videos online, and has called on its fighters to ensure civilians are protected.

“There were transgressions in El Fasher and the investigation and accountability committees have arrived in the city and begun their work,” Hemedti said in a televised speech.

The RSF leader also called for the immediate release of any civilians who had been “unlawfully detained”.

More than 30,000 people have fled El Fasher since Sunday, according to the International Organization for Migration.

But an official with Unicef said there were still an estimated 130,000 children in the city, “at grave risk, trapped by shelling and fighting, with reports of abductions, killings, maiming and sexual violence”.