RSF did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment on Musa’s account.
Arjan Hehenkamp, Darfur crisis lead for the International Rescue Committee in Sudan, said in a video call Thursday that about 5,000 people have left El Fasher for Tawila, where several non-governmental organizations are supporting a camp for internally displaced people.
“It’s a trickle,” he said, adding that it was “disturbing” that so few had managed to reach the city.
Those who made it are mostly women and children, Justine Muzik Piquemal, regional director of the French nongovernmental organization Solidarités International, said in a separate interview Wednesday.
Along the way “women are being raped,” he said, adding that many walked through the desert to avoid militias along the way. “They have nothing with them.”
Videos posted to social media by RSF fighters show scenes of carnage in the city they left behind.
One of them, filmed near the berm, shows dozens of bodies. on the ground and fighters with RSF insignia walking among them while vehicles burn nearby and sporadic gunshots are heard in the background.
“We killed them,” can be heard from the man who recorded the video, which has been verified by NBC News. “Now they are just dust.”
Another shows an RSF commander, whom NBC News has identified as Abu Lulu, shooting into a row of men sitting on the ground.
Fighting has raged in Sudan since war broke out in April 2023 between the Sudanese army, controlled by the country’s top commander and de facto ruler, General Abdel-Fattah Burhan, and his former deputy, General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, a former camel trader widely known as Hemedti who heads the RSF.
Both men were leaders of a counterinsurgency against an uprising in the region, a conflict that in 2005 led dictator Omar al-Bashir to become the world’s first sitting leader to be indicted by the International Criminal Court on suspicion of genocide.
Burhan and Dagalo were part of the military establishment that helped topple al-Bashir in 2019 after widespread popular unrest. Two years later, they agreed to govern together after a coup that toppled the Western-backed government of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok.
However, their alliance broke down spectacularly over how to manage the transition to civilian rule, and as neither seemed willing to relinquish power, fighting broke out.
Since then, Sudan’s military government has repeatedly accused the UAE of supplying weapons to the RSF and has filed a case with the International Court of Justice, accusing it of being complicit in the genocide in West Darfur. The Emiratis have denied the charges.
But in one of its last acts, the Biden administration declared that the RSF and its allies were committing genocide in a war that has caused the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with part of the country, including the El Fasher area, mired in famine. More than 14 million people have fled their homes.
With so many displaced and reliable data lacking, estimates vary widely on the death toll, but as of May the United Nations said 40,000 people had been killed. The actual number of victims is likely much higher.
After withdrawing from El-Fasher, its last stronghold in Darfur, the army said it hoped to save civilians from further violence. Burhan said the military withdrew due to “systemic destruction and systematic killing of civilians” by the RSF.
In a video message on Wednesday on RSF’s official Telegram account, Dagalo said an investigation had been launched into what he called violations committed by his soldiers during the capture of el-Fasher. The next day, RSF published guidance on the same channel saying its fighters should “protect civilians, facilitate their movement and provide them with assistance.”
He later announced the arrest of several men for human rights violations, including Abu Lulu, the man filmed shooting men on the ground.
But Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Laboratory at the Yale School of Public Health, said that after studying high-resolution satellite images, his team had seen “activity that suggests mass killings at a level that can only be compared to Rwanda,” where an estimated 800,000 people were killed in 1994 by armed militias from a rival ethnic group.
“We have never seen a rate of violence on this scale,” he said in a telephone interview Wednesday, adding that his team could see bodies piling up in the streets in satellite images, with pools of blood around them.
Outside the former El-Fasher children’s hospital, he said images taken on Monday showed dark spots consistent with people lining up. Nearby, he said, was a group of “white objects,” presumably bodies lying on the ground.
An image taken the next day shows bodies piling up throughout the compound.
“There are tens of thousands of us in terms of all the objects consistent with the body on the ground,” Raymond said. “They move like a wood chipper and kill everything that moves.”
RSF did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment on the piles of bodies outside the hospital and elsewhere in the city.
But Raymond said he feared the paramilitary group, which emerged from the notorious Arab Janjaweed militias that carried out genocide during the Darfur conflict in the 2000s, was “ending the liquidation of Darfur.”
“This is the final battle of the Darfur genocide,” he said.
