Families in El Fashir are eating animal feed. Children have been raped while foraging for food. Those who try to escape have been kidnapped and killed.

For the hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped inside the besieged Sudanese city of El Fashir, suffering waits at every turn. They face death by starvation, disease or bombardment if they stay; those who leave have been kidnapped, raped and tortured. If the city falls, rights groups warn, it could trigger the largest bloodbath yet in the country’s catastrophic civil war.

El Fashir is the last city in the western Darfur region outside the control of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary that has been battling the Sudanese army since April 2023. Around 11,000 soldiers and allied fighters are now struggling to hold the city, a last refuge for more than a quarter of a million people, many of whom fled massacres and ruined villages in other parts of Darfur.

The city shudders under daily attacks: Witnesses described children in makeshift shelters being torn apart by shells. El Fashir once had 36 clinics and hospitals; only a single one remains partly operational, and many doctors have been forced into hiding. The city’s water plant has been targeted repeatedly, and cholera is rampaging through a population crippled by hunger.

The Washington Post spoke or exchanged voice notes with a doctor, a volunteer emergency responder, three aid workers and six civilians. Some provided video and photos to support their accounts but asked that they not be published, fearing it could make them a target for the RSF. Their stories align with statements from aid agencies and other reporting on the situation inside El Fashir.

“There is death everywhere,” said one resident, speaking like others in this article on the condition of anonymity for safety reasons. The RSF’s actions “may amount to the crime against humanity of extermination,” the United Nations declared this month.

Families inside the city said they have been reduced to eating leaves and animal feed. They recounted women and children being captured and sexually assaulted while foraging for wild plants.

There have been no international aid deliveries since April. In the months since, two U.N. truck convoys have been bombed while trying to break the siege. Five people were killed in the first attack. The World Food Program (WFP) says it is readying another convoy in the event of a ceasefire.

But there’s no sign of one. Last week, the United States, along with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, appealed for a three-month truce “to enable the swift entry of humanitarian aid to all parts of Sudan.” The military-led government welcomed the statement. The RSF issued no public response.

Nearly 600,000 people have fled El Fashir and its surrounding settlements over the last 16 months, the U.N. says. Some of the sprawling camps originally set up to house people displaced by Darfur’s genocide two decades ago are now abandoned. Roads leaving the city are lined with bodies, according to families who recently escaped. Fleeing civilians are often forced at gunpoint into makeshift RSF detention centers and held for exorbitant ransoms few can afford.

The deadly vise around El Fashir can be seen from space: Satellite imagery from Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab shows the RSF has constructed 31 kilometers of earthen walls encircling the city to tighten its grip.

The paramilitary “is creating a literal kill box,” the researchers noted, warning of an imminent massacre. In May 2024, when the RSF took El Geneina, a smaller town to the west, between 10,000 to 15,000 people were killed, the U.N. said.

Slow starvation

Sudan’s civil war erupted after a prolonged power struggle between the military chief and the head of the RSF. The two men joined forces in 2021 to overthrow a civilian-led government, then turned on each other.

As the fighting spread, atrocities multiplied. Hospitals and clinics were attacked; doctors and activists were kidnapped and tortured; ethnic violence exploded and famine took hold. Regional powers vying for a slice of the country’s gold trade and vast agricultural tracts, as well as control of the Red Sea, pumped weapons into the conflict despite mounting evidence of war crimes by both sides. More than 12 million people have fled their homes and 30 million need aid, the U.N. says.

In March, the military recaptured the capital, Khartoum, and it is pushing against RSF forces in the south. But the paramilitary controls the vast majority of Darfur and, if it captures El Fashir, the country could face de facto partition, experts fear. Capturing the city would also give the RSF unfettered access to the weapons bazaars and oil refineries of Libya, and to smuggling routes that stretch across the Sahel.

In the meantime, El Fashir is starving. Families said they are surviving on crushed peanut waste from oil extraction — normally used for animal feed — and wild greens. Inflation has driven markets to collapse. Flour is an impossible dream at $30 per kilo, residents said. The same amount of millet goes for $53.

Searching for food is dangerous. Men who move around are often killed, residents said, while women and children are increasingly vulnerable. One man, Abdullah, said his daughter and niece had gone to the city limits to gather weeds when they were attacked by RSF gunmen.

“My 14-year-old daughter was raped along with two others,” he said, sobbing so badly he had to end the call. His 16-year-old niece was hospitalized in critical condition, he said, and her mother was killed by an artillery shell while she was being treated. “She was left alone to face her pain,” said Abdullah.

His daughter was too ashamed to come home, he said, and he struggled to comfort her. “She cried in a way that no ordinary person could imagine. … I told her that you are more honorable than them. You were forced, but they are cowards.”

He begged the international community to send food. Without it, Abdullah said, “we will all die, and shame will follow you forever.”

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Relentless attacks

Abdullah’s neighbor Fatima, 31, is a mother of four — but only her eldest daughter is with her now. Her family fled to El Fashir in April after RSF forces attacked the Zamzam displacement camp on the outskirts of the city.

Fighters fired on panicking civilians as they ran, she said, and she was separated from her three young sons, ages 10, 7 and 4. Her injured husband went to look for them in July, as soon as he could walk again, and never returned.

Zamzam, once home to a half-million people, is deserted. Some 1,500 civilians were killed in the April attack, the U.N. estimates.

Now, both Abdullah and Fatima are camped out in a converted school in El Fashir with dozens of other hungry families. They used to retreat to a dugout shelter during RSF artillery attacks, she said, but it flooded recently. Families have nowhere to run now when the bombs whistle down.

On the last day of August, she said, shells killed several people, including her neighbor’s 3-year-old daughter. Another young girl next to her was disemboweled.

“We were all praying and crying, with voices resembling the Day of Judgment,” Fatima said.

On Friday morning, a drone strike killed more than 50 people during morning prayers at a mosque in northwest El Fashir, a resident said. Footage posted online showed burned and bloodied bodies.

Medics are overwhelmed. Many are working from private houses after seeing colleagues killed on the job. One doctor said the animal feed that people were subsisting on was moldy and contaminated, causing widespread food poisoning. With basic supplies long exhausted, doctors are using mosquito nets as gauze. There’s no disinfectant, they said, only hot water.

“But I would not leave even if I could,” the doctor said, “because my patients need me.”

The last road out

There is one way out of El Fashir — for those who can afford it. Fleeing civilians are easy prey for RSF extortionists. A woman described being robbed by gunmen as she left the city, then again after reaching the nearest town.

Those from the Zaghawa ethnic group are singled out for abuse, she said, because they make up the largest group of the “joint forces,” former African rebels now allied with the military. RSF fighters are largely drawn from rival Arab tribes.

“We were called slaves,” the woman said, and “subjected to savage abuse.”

Another man who recently escaped said he was forced to pay the equivalent of $200 for every member of his family before they were allowed to pass. He shared electronic receipts showing bank transfers to a man he said was an RSF fighter. Each receipt included the same note: “money for relocating 8 people from Gorni to Korma.”

More than 1,200 others who made the journey were unable to pay and are languishing in RSF captivity, according to relatives and volunteers working to free them. Some are injured, relatives said, and the stench of rotting wounds fills the camp. Men, women and children sleep beneath trees, watched over by gunmen. Many have been there for months as their families try to scrape together the ransom.

The end point for many is Tawila, a small town that hosts 800,000 displaced people and is gripped by cholera. “Some people have walked 60 kilometers on foot, bleeding from gunshot wounds and severe whippings, yet they are the fortunate few who survived,” Sylvain Penicaud, a project coordinator for Doctors Without Borders in Tawila, said in a statement last week. “They arrive exhausted, broken, and in such extreme states of distress.”

One man recounted leaving El Fashir recently with a group of 60, including his brother. Their group was attacked four times by RSF fighters, he said. His brother was fatally shot — the two men managed to pray together briefly before he died — and a friend was whipped to death in front of him. He recalled passing three injured people by the roadside, but he had no strength to help them. When he could walk no more, a woman with a donkey cart took pity and carried him the rest of the way to Tawila.

“I ask God to take my soul,” the man said.

Sudan’s war continues to be fueled by outside actors. The military has received drones from Iran and Turkey; a State Department-funded report in October concluded with “near certainty” that 32 flights between June 2023 and May 2024 were weapons transfers from the United Arab Emirates to the RSF. The UAE has denied providing arms to the group.

“Everyone is completely aware of the scale of the suffering and the crimes unfolding but no one is willing to push the RSF and their powerful foreign backers to stop the atrocities,” said Laetitia Bader, deputy Africa director at Human Rights Watch.

“We’re just watching war crimes in real time.”

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