Hundreds of innocent people, including women and children, were slaughtered in cold blood after an Arab militia went on a killing spree in Sudan’s Darfur region — home to the country’s remaining Christian and non-Muslim population.
Germany’s DW TV reported on Wednesday that “members of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary had ruthlessly killed 460 patients and companions at the Saudi Maternity Hospital in el-Fasher,” the capital of North Darfur region.
The RSF, which evolved from the Arab-Sudanese Janjaweed militia, massacred men, women, and children as its fighters went from door to door — the latest blood bath in their decades-long war against blacks and non-Arabs in Darfur.
“Witnesses told the AP that RSF fighters — on foot, riding on camels, or in vehicles — went from house to house, beating and shooting at people, including women and children,” the Associated Press reported. “Many died of gunshot wounds in the streets, some while trying to flee to safety, the witnesses said.”
The Daily Telegraph (UK) reported the details of the massacre on Wednesday:
Paramilitary forces turned El Fasher’s last functioning hospital into a “human slaughterhouse,” massacring hundreds of people including patients as they stormed the city, aid workers and local officials say. (…)
A video filmed by RSF fighters and uploaded to social media shows armed soldiers in a ransacked hospital ward strewn with scores of bodies.
One wounded man is shot at close range before the camera pans to a courtyard filled with corpses.
The Sudan Doctors Network, a medical group tracking the war, said the Rapid Support Forces on Tuesday “cold-bloodedly killed everyone they found inside the Saudi Hospital, including patients, their companions, and anyone else present in the wards,” describing it as a “human slaughterhouse”.
Six medical workers, including four doctors, a pharmacist, and a nurse, were also abducted from the hospital, the group said.
The RSF had demanded a ransom of 100 million Sudanese pounds ($42,000) for each doctor, it added.
El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur and the last major stronghold of government forces in the region, had been under siege for 18 months before it finally fell earlier this week.
Over 2,000 people are believed to have died in the ensuing mass killings.
The RSF, formerly the Janjaweed militia, has been carrying out a genocide against native Africans, Christians, and others in southern Sudan. “In 2004, the US had declared that the RSF’s forerunner – the notorious Janjaweed militias – had committed genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s. Then, as now, the violence was directed against darker-skinned, non-Arab groups,” The Guardian (UK) reported earlier this year.
Since the conflict began in 2003, more than 150,000 people have been massacred in Darfur, and over 10 million have been displaced.
The RSF’s genocidal campaign against non-Arabs included systemic rape, including the targeting of children just one year old. “Armed men are raping and sexually assaulting children as young as one during Sudan’s civil war, says the UN children’s agency, Unicef,” the BBC reported in March 2025. “So traumatised are the survivors that some say they have attempted to end their lives.”
While the UN agency, UNICEF, refused to name the RSF, the BBC revealed the Arab militia’s role in the atrocities. “Unicef does not say who is responsible, but other UN investigations have blamed the majority of rapes on the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), saying RSF fighters had a pattern of using sexual violence to terrorise civilians and suppress opposition to their advances,” the broadcaster added.
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