Women and Children Bear the Brunt of Escalating Violence
Sudan – A grim specter of a dark past has descended upon the Sudanese city of el-Fasher, where emerging evidence of systematic killings has prompted human rights and aid activists to describe the civil war as a “continuation of the Darfur genocide,” a chilling echo of the atrocities that defined the region two decades ago. The recent fall of this strategic city after an 18-month siege by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) represents a catastrophic convergence of historical ethnic hatreds and the brutal realities of a modern-day power struggle, plunging the region into an abyss of violence and starvation.
The RSF, which emerged from the notorious Janjaweed militias accused of massacring hundreds of thousands of non-Arab Darfuris in the early 2000s, has once again been thrust into the center of international condemnation. As reported by the BBC, the paramilitary force has been repeatedly accused of orchestrating ethnic killings since its power struggle with the national army erupted into all-out violence in April 2023, allegations its leadership has consistently denied, even as its own leader recently admitted to unspecified “violations.”
The most damning evidence of these violations comes from the RSF fighters themselves, who have taken to social media to share gruesome videos that serve as apparent trophies of their brutality. As documented by the BBC, these videos reportedly show summary executions of mostly male civilians and ex-combatants, with fighters seen celebrating over dead bodies and taunting and abusing terrified individuals, creating a digital archive of alleged war crimes.
For the women and children of el-Fasher, the fall of the city has not been marked by digital bravado but by a visceral reality of terror and survival. Exhausted survivors who managed to escape paint a picture of a city where violence is indiscriminate and fear is the only constant. “The situation in el-Fasher is extremely dire and there are violations taking place on the roads, including looting and shooting, with no distinction made between young or old,” one man told the BBC Arabic service after his harrowing journey to relative safety.
The specific targeting of families during flight is a recurring horror in survivor testimonies. Another woman, Ikram Abdelhameed, provided a chilling account to the Reuters news agency, detailing how RSF soldiers separated fleeing civilians at an earthen barrier encircling the city and systematically shot the men, leaving women and children to witness the executions before being forced to continue their flight alone into an uncertain future.
Corroborating these ground-level accounts, satellite imagery analysis conducted by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab has uncovered disturbing evidence of what appear to be organized massacre sites. The analysts have identified clusters of bodies and reddish patches on the earth they believe could be blood stains, providing a terrifying bird’s-eye view of the carnage that has unfolded.
Based on this mounting evidence, the Yale researchers concluded in a report that el-Fasher “appears to be in a systematic and intentional process of ethnic cleansing of… indigenous non-Arab communities through forced displacement and summary execution.” This formal accusation elevates the crisis from a series of wartime atrocities to a coordinated campaign of destruction.
According to Kate Ferguson, co-founder of the NGO Protection Approaches, the pattern of violence established by the Janjaweed in the early 2000s is being meticulously repeated in Darfur today. She points to the 2023 massacre of members of the Massalit ethnic group in el-Geneina, West Darfur, which the UN says killed up to 15,000 people, as a direct precursor to the events now unfolding in el-Fasher.
“For more than two years, the RSF have followed a very clear, practiced and predicted pattern,” Ms. Ferguson stated at a press briefing, a sentiment echoed in analyses by Al Jazeera. She described a deliberate strategy of first encircling a target city, weakening it by cutting off access to food, medicine, and communication, and then overwhelming the population with “systematic arson, sexual violence, massacre and the destruction of vital infrastructure.”
It is within this framework of systematic destruction that the war’s most devastating impact on women and children becomes clear. The RSF’s siege of el-Fasher for 18 months deliberately severed the lifelines of the city, creating conditions of such profound scarcity that a formal famine has now been declared there, as well as in the town of Kadugli, by the global hunger monitor, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC).
The IPC, the leading international authority on hunger crises, stated in a new report that famine is not merely a byproduct of the conflict but a “man-made emergency,” a direct consequence of the RSF’s siege tactics. In el-Fasher and Kadugli, the group reported a “total collapse of livelihoods, starvation, extremely high levels of malnutrition and death,” with the most vulnerable—children and their mothers—bearing the brunt of the suffering.
The clinical definition of famine, as confirmed by the IPC, requires specific, catastrophic thresholds: deaths from malnutrition-related causes must reach at least two people, or four children under five, per 10,000 daily; at least one in five households must face an extreme lack of food; and at least 30% of children must suffer from acute malnutrition. These thresholds have now been met, confirming the world’s worst hunger crisis is unfolding in Sudan.
The confirmation of famine by the IPC is a rare and grave event, reserved for only the most severe catastrophes, such as in northern Gaza earlier this year and in Somalia in 2011. That this designation now applies to parts of Sudan underscores the scale of the man-made disaster, one disproportionately affecting the children of Darfur and Kordofan.
As the RSF consolidated its control over el-Fasher, a massive and desperate exodus began. Thousands of civilians, most with only the clothes on their backs, fled towards nearby towns like Tawila, Melit, and Tawisha—towns that the IPC now warns are themselves at imminent risk of famine, unable to support the influx of starving and traumatized people.
The profiles of those arriving in these overwhelmed hubs are telling. Doctors Without Borders reported last week that most new arrivals in Tawila were women, children, and elderly people “with catastrophic levels of malnutrition.” In a stark statistic that lays bare the generational impact of the crisis, all 70 children under the age of five who arrived on a single day were acutely malnourished, with over half classified as severe cases.
Survivors arriving in Tawila have recounted scenes of utter desperation from within the besieged city, where families were forced to run out of food and resort to scrounging for animal fodder to stave off hunger. For mothers, this meant watching their children weaken and starve, with no means to provide them with even the most basic sustenance.
The strategic shift of the RSF to focus on Darfur and Kordofan after being pushed out of the capital, Khartoum, has sealed the fate of these regions. In Kadugli, as reported by Save the Children, food supplies have completely run out amid intensified fighting, creating a sealed chamber of starvation where tens of thousands are trapped.
The new IPC report estimates that approximately 375,000 people have been pushed into famine conditions in Darfur and Kordofan as of September, a number that is likely a conservative estimate given the communication blackouts and access restrictions. A further 6.3 million people across Sudan face extreme levels of hunger, creating a nationwide catastrophe.
The trauma inflicted upon children extends beyond physical starvation. The constant exposure to violence, the witnessing of the deaths of family members, and the abrupt severance from home and community have created a mental health crisis of untold proportions among a generation of Sudanese youth, the effects of which will be felt for decades.
For women, the threat is multi-faceted, encompassing not only starvation and displacement but also the ever-present shadow of systematic sexual violence, which activists like Kate Ferguson identify as a core component of the RSF’s strategy to destroy and displace communities. These acts of violence are weapons of war, used to terrorize populations and shred the social fabric.
While the IPC noted a slight improvement in food security in some areas like Khartoum following the military’s recapture, this offers little solace for the western and southern regions of Sudan, where the situation has dramatically worsened. This disparity highlights the localized and intentional nature of the famine, concentrated in areas under RSF assault.
The international response has been one of mounting outrage, with condemnations from the UN, the African Union, the European Union, and the UK. However, these expressions of concern have thus far failed to translate into the decisive action needed to halt the violence or facilitate unimpeded humanitarian access to the starving populations.
In the face of this political paralysis, aid groups on the ground are operating in near-impossible conditions. Their reports, cited by both the BBC and Al Jazeera, serve as the world’s primary window into the suffering, documenting the skeletal frames of children and the exhausted resilience of mothers who have walked for days to find help.
The IPC itself has issued an unambiguous call for a ceasefire, identifying it as the sole measure that “can prevent further loss of life and help contain the extreme levels of acute food insecurity and acute malnutrition.” Without an immediate cessation of hostilities, the famine is expected to spread, consuming more of Sudan’s most vulnerable citizens.
