Sudan's forgotten war deepens: Amnesty details El Fasher atrocities as El-Obeid braces for siege

Sudan's civil war, often overshadowed by conflicts elsewhere, has entered another grim chapter, with human-rights investigators detailing mass atrocities in the Darfur city of El Fasher and the United Nations warning that a fresh catastrophe may be looming.

El Fasher, the Sudanese army's last major stronghold in the western Darfur region, was overrun in late October by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). In a new report, Amnesty International said the RSF committed crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing during its campaign to seize the city, trapping civilians inside and killing, detaining, torturing and raping many others.

Amnesty said it had interviewed dozens of people unlawfully detained by the RSF, some held for ransom, and described the aftermath of the city's fall as "a stain on the conscience of humanity." Rights groups reported that fighters killed or abducted hundreds of health workers, patients and others at El Fasher's last functioning hospital. The RSF has previously denied deliberately targeting civilians.

The war, fought between the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces since April 2023, has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions, creating what the United Nations calls the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

Attention is now shifting to El-Obeid, a strategic city that the UN human-rights office has warned could become the next major battleground. Officials fear a repeat of El Fasher if the RSF launches a full assault, with civilians once again caught in the middle.

The scale of Sudan's suffering has struggled to command sustained international attention, in part because access for journalists and aid workers is so restricted and because the world's diplomatic bandwidth is stretched across multiple simultaneous wars.

Aid agencies say the humanitarian response remains drastically underfunded, with famine conditions reported in parts of the country and relief convoys frequently blocked or looted. International bodies including the African Union and the UN have called for accountability, but with fighting ongoing, there is little prospect of justice in the near term.

For millions of Sudanese, the immediate reality is displacement, hunger and fear — and a war whose end remains nowhere in sight.