April 2023 – October 27, 2025 · North Darfur Theater
April 2023 – October 27, 2025
El Fasher was the last major Darfur city outside RSF control and the refuge for hundreds of thousands displaced from the rest of the region. The RSF besieged it from May 2024 — cutting food and water, shelling the displacement camps around it, and triggering famine inside them — for eighteen months. On October 27, 2025 the RSF announced its capture. What followed was the worst massacre of the war: the UN Human Rights Office documented more than 6,000 killings in the first three days alone, with satellite imagery corroborating mass killing sites, and Darfuri officials putting the toll far higher. Patients and staff were killed inside the Saudi Maternity Hospital. In February 2026 the UN found that the RSF's conduct in taking the city amounted to war crimes. A 2026 Yale Humanitarian Research Lab satellite analysis documented an estimated 30,000 to 60,000 dead in El Fasher over the course of the siege and its aftermath — a toll that, if confirmed, would make it one of the deadliest single battles of the 21st century.
Commanders