A year after Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) seized El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, civilians who survived the takeover are still describing mass detention, torture and killings inside the city, according to new testimony published by Amnesty International on Friday.

Amnesty said it interviewed 25 people between August and September, including 19 residents and six humanitarian workers. Of the 19 residents, 17 said they had been detained by the RSF, most for months, with release coming only after relatives paid ransoms or after the detainees managed to escape. Nine of them were held in schools that the RSF had converted into makeshift detention centres; all were freed or escaped by July or August. Satellite imagery reviewed by Amnesty in September suggested some of those school sites had since closed, though two other facilities, Shala prison and the Mina al-Bari detention centre, still showed significant activity.

The human toll of the siege and its aftermath is stark: aid groups estimate fewer than 70,000 people remain in a city that had a pre-war population of more than one million. Officials assess that the highest level of famine classification, IPC Level 5, is highly likely to be confirmed in North Darfur, including El Fasher, in the coming months.

“A pervasive pall of fear hangs over El Fasher today,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, who added that the international community has failed to act and accused the United Arab Emirates of continuing to back the RSF.

Survivors described brutal conditions inside the detention sites. Modathir, a 29-year-old Zaghawa man held in Shala prison (not his real name, used by Amnesty to protect his identity), said he was beaten regularly and watched detainees executed, including, he said, for the offence of sleeping too much. Haram, a 45-year-old Zaghawa woman held at a school in the Daraja Oula neighbourhood, described beatings and ethnic slurs directed at Zaghawa women. Hadia, a 30-year-old woman from the Gimir community who was also held at a school, told Amnesty that her three children were diagnosed with malnutrition after she escaped with them to the town of Tawila in August. One returning resident, speaking anonymously, described El Fasher as a city left completely destroyed, where everyone is “terrorized.”

Amnesty said it wrote to the RSF on October 9 to share its findings and request a response, but had not received one by the time of publication. The group’s report builds on findings it published in July, which concluded that the RSF committed crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing during its campaign to take El Fasher, with Zaghawa and other non-Arab communities singled out for abuse.

Amnesty is calling on the RSF to release everyone arbitrarily detained and to end torture, killings and forced labour in areas it controls. It is also renewing calls for a ceasefire, the deployment of an international protection force, a halt to arms transfers to all parties in the conflict — including the UAE — and an expansion of the United Nations arms embargo to cover all of Sudan, not just Darfur.

Sudan’s civil war, between the RSF and the Sudanese armed forces, has raged since April 2023 and has displaced millions of people, with Darfur among the hardest-hit regions in a conflict aid agencies continue to describe as one of the world’s gravest humanitarian crises.

Sources: Amnesty International, Al Jazeera