‘We Walked Without Looking Back’: Families Relive Terrifying Escape from El-Fasher

Escapees from the besieged Sudanese city of El-Fasher have recounted harrowing scenes of violence and desperation following its capture by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on October 26, 2025, after an 18-month siege. In the Tine refugee transit camp in eastern Chad, more than 300 kilometres away, survivors described intensified drone strikes in the days leading up to the fall, with civilians cramming into makeshift shelters and subsisting on peanut shells amid relentless bombardment. The United Nations estimates that nearly 90,000 people have fled the city in the past two weeks, many enduring days without food as they crossed arid plains to reach safety.

Sixteen-year-old Mounir Abderahmane, who fled while tending to his wounded father at the Saudi hospital, witnessed RSF fighters summon seven nurses into a room before gunshots rang out and blood seeped under the door. His father, a soldier in the regular army injured in earlier clashes, died en route to Chad after an 11-day journey. Other refugees reported similar atrocities, including 53-year-old Mahamat Ahmat Abdelkerim discovering about 10 civilian bodies still oozing blood inside a house where he hid with his family; his seventh child had been killed by a drone strike days prior. Forty-two-year-old Mouna Mahamat Oumour described a shell exploding near her group, tearing her aunt's body to pieces, forcing the family to cover it with a cloth and press onwards without looking back.

The RSF, which traces its origins to the Janjaweed militias responsible for ethnic cleansing in Darfur between 2003 and 2008 that killed an estimated 300,000 people and displaced 2.7 million, has been accused of widespread abuses alongside the army in the ongoing civil war that erupted in April 2023. Escapees navigated a gauntlet of horrors to leave El-Fasher, including climbing over piles of corpses in a massive trench dug by the RSF to encircle the city, as recounted by 29-year-old Samira Abdallah Bachir, who crossed with her three young children while avoiding stepping on the bodies. At checkpoints on the main escape roads, fighters reportedly demanded $800 to $1,600 in cash for passage, amid reports of rape and theft.

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The conflict, driven in part by control over Sudan's gold and oil resources, has killed tens of thousands, displaced nearly 12 million people, and sparked the world's largest hunger crisis, with a UN-backed monitor confirming famine in El-Fasher and another city. At the overcrowded Tine camp, aid workers from Doctors Without Borders are relocating refugees to ease congestion and accommodate new arrivals. Satellite imagery from October 26 shows smoke rising from fires around El-Fasher Airport, underscoring the intensity of the final assault on the army's last Darfur stronghold.

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