Reports of Mass Killings by Militia After Key City Falls in Sudan

Sudan’s brutal civil war entered a new round of extreme violence this week after the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) captured the key city of El Fasher in Western Darfur following a year and a half of siege.

Witnesses and local reports described massacres and executions of civilians by the militia as thousands fled the city. El Fasher was seen as the last holdout in Darfur of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), whom the RSF has been fighting for the past three years in the brutal civil war. Both sides have been accused of war crimes.

Martha Ama Akyaa Pobee, the Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations for Africa, told an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council that there was no safe passage for civilians to leave.

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“In the past week, the U.N. human rights office has documented widespread and serious human rights violations in and around El Fasher,” she said. “These include credible reports of mass killings in various locations and summary executions during house-to-house searches and as civilians have tried to flee the city.”

Here is what we know about the atrocities so far.

The fall of El Fasher

Last weekend, the city of El Fasher was captured by the RSF militia after months of fighting Sudan’s military, a development that led to a series of reported massacres and mass killings by the group against the local population.

The city’s fall marks a “significant shift in the security dynamics” of Sudan, Pobee told the Security Council on Thursday, adding that the implications for the country’s civil war and the wider region are “profound.”

“The territorial scope of the conflict is broadening,” she said, cautioning that drone strikes by both RSF and SAF were hitting new targets further afield across Blue Nile, South Kordofan, West Darfur and Khartoum.

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“The risk of mass atrocities, ethnically targeted violence and…