Doctors Without Borders: Sudan's el-Fasher largely destroyed and empty
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) described the city of el-Fasher, Sudan, as “largely destroyed” and “empty” after its first visit to the area since February 2025.
MSF said its staff spent four hours in the city on 15 January, after being granted access to assess the needs of civilians and medical facilities.
“We saw destroyed areas, largely emptied of the communities that used to live there. The regional capital now looks like a ghost town, with few civilians remaining,” MSF said in a statement this week.
The organisation added that its visit was “too limited” to allow for “more than a glimpse of el-Fasher”, yet revealed the “sheer scale of the destruction that took place in the city as many of its residents were wiped out”.
In October, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) seized the North Darfur state capital after more than 550 days of siege.
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Sudanese who fled el-Fasher told Middle East Eye and other media and humanitarian organisations about widespread massacres, mass rapes and looting by the RSF, which receives funding and military support from the United Arab Emirates.
Middle East Eye has also analysed footage of RSF fighters capturing and targeting civilians attempting to flee.
An estimated 260,000 people lived in el-Fasher under siege before the RSF stormed the city.
According to the UN's World Food Programme, there were “anywhere between 70,000 and 100,000 people potentially remaining trapped inside” el-Fasher as of December.
Yale Humanitarian Research Lab estimated that the RSF had burned or buried tens of thousands of bodies after its seizure of the city.
MSF said while it has been working to locate and support survivors across Darfur, the recent visit to el-Fasher has increased fears that “most of the civilians who were still alive when RSF seized the city have since been killed or displaced”.
Earlier this week, the RSF launched an offensive in Sudan’s Blue Nile state. However, its enemy, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), broke an RSF siege on the Southern city of Dilling after two years.
It is estimated that more than 150,000 people may have been killed and 14 million displaced since the start of the war in Sudan in April 2023, which broke out over plans to fold the RSF into the regular military as part of a political transition.
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