FROM NBC NEWS: The blood is visible from space as bodies pile up from a slaughter unprecedented in recent times.
Surrounded by a sand barrier built during an 18-month siege, most of the 250,000 people in el-Fasher, in western Sudan, have been trapped as paramilitary fighters from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have rampaged through the city. Experts estimate tens of thousands have been killed in the past week.
With the key regional capital under a communications blackout, it has been left to eyewitness accounts as well as satellite imagery and video shared on social media to reveal the scale of what is unfolding in el-Fasher and the surrounding Darfur region, prompting humanitarian organizations to warn that the northeast African nation is returning to its genocidal past.
According to eyewitnesses, when the Sudanese military withdrew from the city, thousands of people tried to leave el-Fasher on Saturday.
Mutaz Mohamed Musa said he was one of them. The fleeing people were attacked almost immediately as RSF fighters fired at them and surrounded them with pickup trucks.
“They opened direct fire on civilians,” Musa said.
He called the turmoil “extremely intense and people scattered in all directions.”
They were chased and run over by the trucks or captured. He saw people executed in front of him by RSF fighters.
“They would ask a man to run,” he said. “Once you start running, they shoot you.”
Mytaz’s family agreed to pay a ransom for his release.
ABC NEWS reports:
The Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) at the Yale School of Public Health says they observed numerous clusters with discoloration around them, consistent with the appearance of human bodies across the city as RSF advanced.
The apparent masses were seen in a hospital, all over residential neighborhoods, on the outskirts of the city and by military bases of the opposing Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).
The alleged killings took place “in under 72 hours since RSF took control of the city,” Nathaniel Raymond, an American human rights and war crimes investigator at HRL who has been documenting the massacres in Sudan with satellite imagery, told ABC News.
With his team at the research lab, Raymond said he observed “an explosion of objects that measure between 1.3 to 2 meters proliferate all over the ground,” which HRL Yale concluded is human bodies due to the length, shape and videos from the ground showing alleged systematic civilian killings.
“In Daraja Oula — a neighborhood where civilians have been hiding — we’re seeing a tactical posture on the vehicles that is highly consistent with house-to-house killing,” Raymond told ABC News. “This is also consistent with video and testimony from those who reached Tawila. Particularly women, who said that the men are being separated by RSF and then they hear gunshots.”
Blood visible from space in Sudan shows evidence of Darfur genocide, analysts say. https://t.co/EPvQj1kM03
— ABC News (@ABC) October 31, 2025
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