Military Dimension: How Did El Fasher Fall?
The RSF began tightening its grip on El Fasher from mid-2024, constructing a 31-kilometer network of earthen berms and trenches encircling the city to cut it off from the outside world. On October 24, 2025, the Sudanese Armed Forces received orders to withdraw, leaving the defense to the Joint Forces and locally mobilized civilian units. On October 26, the RSF consolidated control, deploying large numbers of vehicles and using sophisticated jamming equipment to break the defenders’ command and control.
What followed were described as “three days of horror” — point-blank executions in homes and streets, and massacres at El Fasher University and the Saudi Hospital, where hundreds of patients, medical staff, and displaced persons were killed.
Humanitarian Dimension: What Happened to Civilians?
Of the 260,000 people still in the city when it fell, only 40% managed to flee alive, while thousands were wounded. The fate of the rest remains unknown.
During the siege, residents were forced to eat livestock fodder, and when that ran out, to eat animal skins soaked in water. One survivor said: “Life became unbearable. We were eating only the food for livestock. When there was no more, we ate the skin of the animal. We soaked it in water and ate.”
The report documented that girls and women aged seven to 70, including pregnant women, were raped and subjected to other forms of sexual violence, including whippings, beatings, and forced nudity. Women were assaulted in rooms filled with the corpses of their own husbands.
A UN Human Rights Office report published February 13 estimated that the RSF killed at least 6,000 people in the first 72 hours following the takeover, noting that the actual death toll is undoubtedly significantly higher due to the absence of monitoring.
Humanitarian Dimension: Aid Convoys in the Line of Fire
On February 20 — the RSF and its ally the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement–North targeted a humanitarian aid convoy in the Kartala area of South Kordofan carrying food and supplies destined for Kadugli and Dilling, killing three aid workers and wounding four others. This marks the second drone strike on an aid convoy in less than a month.
In parallel, a multi-agency UN convoy reached Dilling and Kadugli for the first time in three months, delivering aid to more than 130,000 people — the first major delivery since both cities were cut off for over two years. The convoy was forced to take a longer, difficult off-road route to avoid the direct road due to intensified fighting.
International Dimension: 30+ Nations Condemn — and Stand Powerless
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk expressed alarm, stating that these attacks “perpetuate a pattern that we have seen time and again in this conflict of attacks on civilian objects and infrastructure, including markets, health facilities and schools,” and urging all parties to immediately cease targeting civilian objects.
Nexus Analysis: The drone war has become a parallel weapon of slow-motion annihilation — both parties deploying it against civilians, infrastructure, and aid convoys. The tragic equation: for every aid convoy that arrives, another is bombed on the way.