Sudan's RSF waged starvation campaign in siege of el-Fasher

Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) waged a campaign of starvation against the people of el-Fasher, razing dozens of farming villages and devastating crop production around the city, according to a major new report corroborating UN allegations of genocide. 

The report, produced by Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) with Nasa’s Harvest programme, used satellite imagery and other data to identify 41 agricultural communities attacked between March and June 2024, the first months of a siege that went on for more than 500 days.

Over the following months, two-thirds of those communities showed “no visible pattern of life”, suggesting residents had been displaced or killed. During the same period, the area of land being farmed declined by more than 80 percent.

Forensic analysis of the patterns of damage to the buildings based on remote sensing data showed that the communities were attacked deliberately, Yale’s HRL said.

Ten of the 41 communities attacked were razed more than once, the report found, with at least six communities targeted for burning three or more times. One of these was razed to the ground at least seven times. 

Twenty-eight of the communities appear to have no visible pattern of life. These findings, the report said, suggest the attacks displaced or killed residents of the farming communities, which led to decreased food production in the region. 

The Yale HRL report follows one last month from the UN Fact-Finding Mission on Sudan, which found that the RSF’s takeover of el-Fasher bore all the “hallmarks of genocide”, including the destruction of the means of survival. 

The UN’s report found that the RSF had “deliberately imposed conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of non-Arab communities, in particular the Zaghawa and the Fur”, two Black African groups that have been targeted by the RSF throughout the war. 

Yale’s HRL said that the intentional razing of agricultural communities corroborated these findings. The report is the first study of its kind to use remotely sensed data to assess food insecurity in conflict settings to corroborate an alleged campaign of intentional starvation.

UAE backing for RSF in Darfur

El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur in western Sudan, was finally taken from the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) by the RSF in October 2025, following a lengthy siege that saw the paramilitary construct a network of earth walls around the city, trapping hundreds of thousands of residents inside a “kill box”.

While the United Arab Emirates continues to deny the allegations, Middle East Eye has reported extensively on its support for the RSF, citing evidence including satellite imagery, flight logs, weapons serial numbers and multiple sources.

Once the RSF stormed into el-Fasher, its fighters raped, executed and extorted residents in large numbers, according to extensive interviews conducted by Middle East Eye and later reports from the UN and Yale’s HRL.

Civilians fleeing the city were also apprehended by the RSF and taken to makeshift detention centres, where they had blood taken from them.

The war in Sudan, between the RSF and SAF, began in April 2023. More than 11 million people are currently displaced from their homes as a result of the war. 

While the UAE and its regional allies, including Ethiopia, Kenya, Chad and eastern Libyan general Khalifa Haftar, back the RSF, the SAF is backed by Egypt, Turkey and now Saudi Arabia, which is embroiled in an ongoing feud with its neighbour and erstwhile ally, the UAE.