In​ 2019, Omar al-Bashir, who had been president of Sudan for thirty years, was ousted in a coup. The new transitional government was a power-sharing arrangement between civilian political parties, the regular army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the latest incarnation of the Janjaweed militias – predominantly recruited from Arabs in Darfur – that Bashir had used to crush rebellion in the province. In 2023, tensions rose between the two military components of the government. Talk of the formal integration of the RSF into the army served as a spark: the RSF, which had gradually acquired autonomy, refused to accept a subsidiary role, and the two sides were suddenly at war. The results have been catastrophic, especially in Darfur.

The main road west from El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, was abandoned by travellers during the war in the region twenty years ago. The needle-like jebels – volcanic hills – were redoubts for bandits. The road is now nicknamed sharia al-hawa, or the route of the air. The new road between El Fasher and the town of Tawila is barely any safer. It’s known as tariq al-mawt – the road of death. When I first took it, in October last year, it was being patrolled by the Sudan Liberation Army, one of the few rebel factions that remained neutral in the stand-off between the RSF and the army. Its forces had come down from their strongholds in the Marra mountains to enable the safe passage of civilians every Friday.

El Fasher is the army’s last foothold in Darfur, and a prime target for the RSF, which controls the other main towns in the region and has held the city under siege since April last year. At first the RSF reluctantly consented to the neutral faction protecting the forty-mile stretch of road from Tawila, but in November it changed its mind, arguing that the rebel corridor was provisioning the army garrison.

When I returned in May, the rebel patrols had been replaced by checkpoints manned by RSF soldiers. Near one of them, the roadside was strewn with open suitcases, clothes and schoolbooks. Witnesses said that all civilians leaving El Fasher had their possessions searched by the RSF and allied Arab militias, who took what they wanted and abandoned the rest. Empty donkey carts stood beside the road: the donkeys had been requisitioned, obliging their owners to proceed on foot. Looters also siphoned water from the jerrycans carried by those leaving the city, contributing to the deaths from thirst and exhaustion that were attested by the fresh graves by the side of the road. Perhaps two hundred people had died here in the space of a month.

There were still bodies in the bush, I was told by members of another rebel faction, now allied with the RSF and deployed a few hundred yards from its checkpoint. I learned that they belonged to the same non-Arab ethnic group as most of the victims of the RSF violence. They were hoping to salvage their reputation by burying the dead and offering help to civilians who were trying to reach Tawila. A nurse in a white coat was providing water mixed with flour to dehydrated children, while men in uniform were helping dozens of survivors onto a trailer so that they could complete their journey.

This was not just a PR exercise. Like all the factions involved in Darfur’s armed opposition to a remote and ruthless central government, these fighters and their parents had struggled for twenty years only to discover that their communities were becoming the victims of a new war between two elements in the Sudanese military that had once been their joint oppressors. The Janjaweed and the army had collaborated in the razing of Darfur between 2003 and 2005, a conflict that the International Criminal Court is still investigating as a genocide.

That war was looming became clear not long after Bashir’s departure. In Darfur there was resentment that the so-called ‘transition’ in Khartoum was nominal. In the capital, the regular army and the RSF continued to work together until in October 2021 they succeeded in toppling the transitional government and its civilian prime minister. The usual analysis of the conflict that began in April 2023 depicts a ‘war between two generals’, with civilians caught in the middle. Such a power struggle might have been confined to Khartoum and easier to resolve.

However, the RSF was recruiting heavily among Arab tribes in Darfur, which already provided the bulk of the group’s leadership and personnel. The war quickly took an ethnic turn when the worsening of long-standing tensions between Arab and non-Arab communities in West Darfur culminated in the massacre of thousands of members of the majority Masalit tribe by the RSF and allied militias in El Geneina in June 2023, and the flight of survivors across the border to Chad. A large proportion of the nearly 900,000 new Sudanese refugees in Chad are Masalit who arrived there in the second half of 2023. By the end of that year, the RSF had taken control of El Geneina, West Darfur’s capital, as well as the capitals of three of Darfur’s other four states. Only El Fasher remained beyond their grasp.

The RSF began negotiations with non-Arab rebel groups, which had deployed in El Fasher thanks to an agreement signed in 2020 with the transitional government. Abderrahim, the brother and deputy of the RSF’s top commander, Hemedti, tried to buy their support, agreeing that they could run El Fasher if they convinced the army to leave. Some rebel leaders responded that they would put up a fight if the RSF entered the city, fearing a repeat of the massacres in El Geneina. Hardliners in the RSF argued that the rebels had deceived Abderrahim with their professions of neutrality. In fact, the rebels had long been divided between pro and anti-RSF camps. RSF supporters called on civilians to evacuate El Fasher; opponents told inhabitants to arm themselves and defend their city. At first, the RSF avoided fighting the rebels in order to focus on Khartoum. But after the majority of Darfuri rebels renounced neutrality in late 2023, sending fighters to support the army in the centre of the country, and the RSF suffered setbacks in Khartoum, El Fasher rapidly rose in importance, becoming perhaps the main theatre in the war.

In April 2024, the RSF surrounded the city and its million inhabitants and began shelling. In the space of a year, it attempted at least two hundred ground assaults; in response, the army conducted aerial bombings, sometimes hitting civilian areas that the RSF had penetrated. Fighters died on both sides, including senior RSF officers. The civilians who took up arms to defend their city were more effective than the regular armed forces. Memories of the RSF’s crimes in El Geneina – as well as of the atrocities committed under Bashir – increased their resolve. El Fasher was nicknamed the ‘lion’s whiskers’, meaning that anyone who touches it is a fool.

Since April 2023, Yasir, a 32-year-old fighter from El Fasher, told me, ‘the RSF entered people’s houses, kidnapped women and raped them, looted vehicles, killed and humiliated people. They wanted to kill us. That was when we formed the self-defence forces.’ He had limited fighting experience. He had worked for the UN and African Union peacekeeping mission to Darfur before it was wound up during the transition and had then turned to smuggling cars from Libya to Darfur. Since the desert was full of highwaymen and RSF soldiers, Yasir and his comrades bought guns in Libya to protect their convoys. Traders played a crucial role in arming the self-defence units. These units gave themselves exotic names: Ered-Ered (‘Crisscross’), Khashin (‘Rough’). This civilian mobilisation served as a justification for the RSF’s insistence, which was systematically repeated by its officers, that ‘there are no civilians in El Fasher.’ Anyone remaining in the city is now seen as a legitimate target.

In response to army counterattacks and resistance from local populations across Sudan, the RSF has acted with increasing violence and has been blocking deliveries of goods and aid. For a few months, supplies to El Fasher depended on the Friday corridor from Tawila. After that route was shut down last November, traders and volunteer fighters like Yasir would travel at night by camel to Tawila to buy food. Some were killed or wounded by the RSF en route. Food prices in El Fasher skyrocketed, with the price of a single onion peaking at 1000 Sudanese pounds, which would have bought ten before the war. The poorest people began eating animal fodder such as ambaz – leftovers from peanut oil mills – but ambaz and water aren’t free either.

According to the definition set out by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system, the siege of El Fasher has now led to famine. Data are not easy to collect in wartime, but a mass screening in March 2024 of 46,000 children in Zamzam, a camp for internally displaced persons ten miles south of El Fasher which had a total population of around half a million, found a malnutrition rate of 29 per cent. The following month, the RSF besieged the El Fasher area. In August, the IPC declared a famine in Zamzam; in December, that classification was extended to two other camps near El Fasher. In March this year, local authorities and NGOs reported a 38 per cent malnutrition rate among children under five in the city itself.

When I first visited Tawila, a year ago, it was harvest season. Thousands of hungry IDPs had left El Fasher to work on farms, taking the Friday corridor to reach the fertile land irrigated by the run-off from the Jebel Marra. The area was relatively safe, thanks to the Sudan Liberation Army manning the corridor. But many IDPs moved into Zamzam, thinking the camp was safer still, well protected by the self-defence units, or perhaps believing that the RSF wouldn’t dare attack an IDP camp. This spring, however, the RSF pulled its troops out of Khartoum after being defeated by the army, with the support of Darfuri rebels and other auxiliaries; many of the RSF troops went back to Darfur in the mood for revenge. The full-scale assault on Zamzam began on 11 April. Intense artillery and drone shelling was followed by attacks from ground units in constant rotation. The three hundred or so defenders in Zamzam were quickly overwhelmed. The army didn’t send in ground forces or air support: the RSF had new anti-aircraft batteries in the area.

‘Zamzam would have been impossible for the RSF to take if the army was supporting us,’ Yasir told me, ‘but there was no support at all.’ On the night of the assault, he recalled, a rebel commander who had come for support with a few dozen cars, gave each self-defence fighter twenty bullets and ordered them to retreat to El Fasher. The following day, the unit assisted in the evacuation to the city of thousands of IDPs, probably saving many lives. A third of Yasir’s comrades are believed to have died in the RSF assault. The attackers hunted them down, he told me, asking for names, looking for faces they had seen on social media.

Nada, a 25-year-old mother of two, had been displaced five times by the time I met her in Tawila in May. Like thousands of others, she had been forced to move from area to area in El Fasher by the RSF bombardment, before fleeing to Zamzam with her children, husband and uncle. With more than two hundred other families, they sheltered in a Quranic school, in a tent she made from her own clothes. When the shooting began, they hid behind a metal fence and watched an RSF vehicle plough through the gate of a clinic run by Sudanese workers for Relief International, the last NGO still in the camp. The aid workers were dragged out of the foxholes they had dug weeks earlier, as many Zamzam residents had, in anticipation of an attack. On RSF social media the foxholes were displayed as evidence that Zamzam was a military base. Nine workers for Relief International were executed.

When the RSF discovered Nada’s family, they killed her husband, her uncle and her five-year-old son. Nada was shot in the leg and the hand. ‘Your men,’ they told her, ‘are falangayat’ – a term used in precolonial Darfur for slaves tasked with menial jobs, and now used by the RSF to denigrate non-Arabs accused of supporting the army. In the chaos, Nada was separated from her three-year-old. In the school where the family had been sheltering, the RSF executed at least a dozen men and boys, both IDPs and religious students. According to witnesses, the RSF soldiers believed that Quranic scholars were casting spells against them. Nada covered her dead family with the clothes she had used as a tent. Shelling made the journey to the graveyard risky and so they were buried in a foxhole at the school, alongside the aid workers. Then she joined the crowds fleeing Zamzam for Tawila.

In Zamzam and on the road, the RSF and the militias that Nada encountered kept asking her what tribe she belonged to. They were looking for members of the Zaghawa, a large non-Arab community whose members constitute the core of the self-defence and rebel groups: Yasir is one of the many Zaghawa who mobilised against the RSF. Many Zaghawa were known to have taken refuge in Zamzam – a large part of the reason for the RSF attack. Soldiers tried to catch people out by speaking to them in Zaghawa, asking ‘Lakuri?’ (‘How are you?’). They checked for anti-RSF messages on phone apps before stealing mobiles. They were also on the lookout for marks on men’s fingers and shoulders indicating that they had used firearms, and for dreadlocks, a common rebel hairstyle. They carried out body searches for the hidden charms popular among rebel fighters – mostly leather pouches containing Quranic verses believed to shield them from bullets.

Those who ran away were assaulted by armed men riding motorbikes, camels or horses. Some men were killed or abducted; women were raped. Trying to distance themselves from the violence, the RSF claimed that the perpetrators were the same old shafshafa – plunderers – who had preyed on the roads around El Fasher for decades. But witnesses claimed they were RSF members or auxiliaries. They mainly targeted men and boys, but there were exceptions. Before the attack on the camp, Hanadi, a 22-year-old Zaghawa who had joined the self-defence forces in Zamzam, was filmed insulting the RSF and holding a knife alongside male combatants. The post went viral on social media. Nada and other women told me that soldiers kept asking them: ‘Are you Hanadi?’ They told Nada that the bullet wound in her hand was proof she had been holding a knife. The real Hanadi was shot while fighting.

According to local estimates, at least two thousand Zamzam residents, most of them civilians, were dead or missing after the attack. Within two months, more than 200,000 IDPs had moved to Tawila; the number has now risen to nearly 600,000. When they arrived, their two priorities were water and shade: some lay under trees or donkey carts, but most, accustomed to multiple displacements, were quick to build shelters with straw and clothing. Then they began to look for their relatives. It took Nada more than two weeks to find her three-year-old son.

For food, newcomers in Tawila had to rely on earlier arrivals and long-term residents. Volunteers did the rounds with buckets of cooked rice, beans and onions and went beyond the distribution sites to feed people who were too exhausted to come to them. Since the war began, young activists across Sudan have been organising takiyas – communal kitchens. The practice dates back to the late 19th century, when Mahdist fighters ran kitchens during the anticolonial struggle against Anglo-Egyptian rule. In the wake of Bashir’s fall, hundreds of Emergency Response Rooms were set up around the country. The ERRs collect money from traders and the Sudanese diaspora, but the key to their success has been support from international NGOs, which find money transfers more efficient and easier than actual aid deliveries. Since Trump’s cuts to USAID and a rise in food prices in Darfur, many ERRs and takiyas have closed down.

Many of those displaced to Tawila believe their only option is to leave Sudan: the RSF has boasted that Tawila will be their next target. ‘Wherever you go, we’ll find you,’ they told Nada. In the small town of Korma, just to the north of Tawila, I saw thousands of IDPs camping under the stars, preparing to board a line of pickup trucks heading for Chad, three hundred miles west. Some of the trucks belonged to the RSF or allied militias: the same men who had attacked the IDPs in Zamzam and fleeced them on the road to Tawila were now extorting money from them as they tried to leave the country. Not everyone can afford the steep fee – between £100 and £200 – to reach the border; many have already paid a similar sum to get as far as Tawila. Yasir had decided to stay put: ‘If El Fasher falls to the RSF, we [non-Arabs] will have no more land in this country,’ he told me. He asked me on WhatsApp if Macron and Starmer would airdrop food to El Fasher ‘like in Gaza’. The RSF has dug trenches and constructed a sand barrier 57 kilometres long to encircle the city and prevent supplies from entering. The war is increasingly fought with drones: last month, in the once well-off Daraja Uwla – ‘First Class’ – neighbourhood, one struck a mosque during dawn prayer, killing seventy people.

It has been nearly a year and a half since the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2736, which demands that the RSF halt its siege of El Fasher. After decades of ineffectual Western meddling, there is consensus among international players that only the Sudanese can rescue their country. The doctrine is neither new nor confined to the West: the Bashir regime used it to mobilise nationalist sentiment against perceived Western conspiracies; so did the African Union, in the name of Pan-Africanism. Western policymakers now think Sudan’s woes can be cured by its ‘civilians’ and ‘civil society’ (ill-defined categories, given their fragmentation and helplessness), especially the ERRs. This is a sign that they have abdicated all responsibility for providing aid and ending the violence. The ERRs were nominated last year and this year for the Nobel Peace Prize. Never mind the Nobel, one of the founders of the ERR in Zamzam told me, the priority is to stop the war. He is now in a refugee camp in Chad, dependent on unreliable aid supplies from the West.