El Fasher, a year later

Nasr City, October 26, 2026

Today is the anniversary, and I still don’t know what that word is supposed to do for anyone.

I was in Cairo when the city fell. I disappeared there — not in any way a person standing outside me could have seen — and I am not leaving that out, as if the one doing the remembering were a pane of glass. But El Fasher sits on an older arithmetic, and the arithmetic is where I have to start.

The old arithmetic

I was in the street in Omdurman on International Women’s Day in 2019, a month before they finally put Omar al-Bashir out of the palace he had occupied for 30 years. Three out of every four people in that crowd were women. The proportion mattered because NISS — the National Intelligence and Security Service, Sudan’s secret police, who have spent decades learning exactly where a society keeps its weight — knew where to look. They find it. Then they go after it.

So they started arresting the women.

There was nothing accidental in this, and nothing hidden. They were not ashamed, because shame requires believing someone is watching who matters, and they did not believe that. If the police took a man that day, it cost almost nothing to get him back: a friend, a cousin, anyone his age from his own street could walk into that station the same afternoon and walk him out again, because a man’s word, in that system, was still worth something on its own. A woman could not do this. A woman arrested had to produce a man — a father, a brother, a husband, some uncle twice removed — because the state had built itself, brick by brick, on the conviction that a woman’s name, standing alone, was not collateral enough to release a woman’s body.

I watched it work. I watched women I knew go quiet in the weeks after, not because they themselves had been taken, but because they understood, suddenly and completely, that the price had changed shape under their feet. It was no longer only her own body in the cell. It was her family’s name, dragged into a police station because she had been standing in a square where the government had decided women should not stand.

That is the oldest trick this state has ever run. I have come to call the thing that runs it a machine — not a government with occasional failures, but an arrangement built to find whatever a population has left, and take it. The war now being fought in Darfur did not invent the trick. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary formed from the Janjaweed — the militias the state itself armed in Darfur two decades ago — inherited it, and scaled it, until a tactic became the way a siege was built.

The city

The siege had an address. Most people who will read this have only ever met it as a dateline, and a dateline doesn’t let you feel what was emptied.

Darfur is the west of Sudan. It is about the size of Spain, pressed up against Chad, Libya, and the Central African Republic, far enough from the Nile and from Khartoum that the center has always been able to treat the distance as a kind of ownership. Farmers and herders live there — Fur, Zaghawa, Masalit, Berti, Borgo, Rizeigat, and more peoples than a briefing ever bothers to list — Arab and non-Arab, in categories the last century hardened and this one found useful. They have shared land, and they have fought over land, and since 2003 they have done both inside a counterinsurgency. The rebellion started the way rebellions in that region usually start. The center took men for its wars and sent almost nothing back. Bashir’s government answered by arming militias, the ones the world learned to call the Janjaweed, and aiming them at the communities the rebels came from. Hundreds of thousands died. The world said genocide, and then largely changed the channel. The militias were not disbanded. They were paid, given rank, and renamed. The Rapid Support Forces are that renaming. Their commander is Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, Hemedti, and he is at war with the army that made the renaming official. El Fasher is where that arrangement came back to the ground it was built on.

The city is older than any of these men. It was the capital of the Fur sultanate, the place Darfur governed itself from, until that was broken from the outside in 1874. Ali Dinar put a sultanate back together in what was left and held it until 1916, when the British killed him and took Darfur into Sudan. After that El Fasher was no longer a capital in the old sense. It was the town where the new state proved it could still reach the west: an administrative post, and the home of the army’s 6th Infantry Division. As long as that division was standing there, Khartoum could still say the west was inside the country.

By the second year of this war, it was the last place in Darfur where that was still true. Nyala had gone. El Geneina had gone, and with it a campaign against the Masalit that anyone willing to look already knew how to name. Zalingei had gone. What was left was a headquarters, an airport, a city swollen with people displaced by the wars before this one and then by this one, and the roads.

Whoever held those roads held the last lock on a corridor running from Khalifa Haftar’s eastern Libya down through North Darfur toward Nyala, with branches toward Chad. Gold moves on them. Weapons move. Fighters move. The army needed the headquarters, because a flag on the 6th Division was the last way to say that west of Kordofan this was still one country. The RSF needed the corridor. They also needed something the army did not. A garrison can change hands in a day. A population that still believes it can come back and call a place its own takes longer, and the siege was how they worked on that.

The siege

What the RSF has done to women across Darfur is the old arithmetic, taken all the way to its end: that you can control a population by making its women afraid. Afraid to flee, afraid to stay, afraid of the simple fact of being visible in daylight.

I have tried, more than once, to sit with the numbers long enough that they stop being numbers, and I am not sure I have ever once succeeded. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) documented 3,396 survivors of sexual violence who reached the organization’s own clinics in North and South Darfur between January 2024 and November 2025. Survivors, they are careful to say, not incidents, and only the ones who could get as far as a door. Of them, 97 percent were women and girls. Armed men carried out more than 95 percent of the assaults recorded in North Darfur. The report takes its title from a survivor — “There is something I want to tell you. . . . ” After the city fell, those clinics treated more than 140 people who had reached Tawila in November alone. Almost all of them had been attacked by armed men. Many of them on the road.

The UN’s own investigators have verified patterns of gang rape and sexual slavery, part of a campaign they later concluded bore the hallmarks of genocide. Most of what they verified traces back to the RSF and the militias riding with it.

The number is the edge. The point of the siege is what the edge is for. A woman who cannot cross her own neighborhood without calculating what waits past the checkpoint has already been removed — from the market, from the clinic, from the street, from every place I have ever believed a republic has to live, if it is going to live anywhere at all. I do not use that word lightly, or as a figure of speech. I mean the kettle, the stall, the gate where people fed each other without being asked. The world people build underneath the one that is trying to kill them. A siege’s first target is always that world, because that world is the only proof a population has that it does not need anyone’s permission to survive.

And the siege did not begin with a massacre. It began the way these things begin, with hunger, and with a word withheld.

In February 2024, MSF estimated that around 13 children were dying each day in Zamzam camp, just south of the city — at least one every two hours — and said the severely malnourished who had not yet died would die within weeks if they could not reach treatment. Famine was not declared there until August. It was the first place in this entire war where the word was finally permitted to be official. The children had not been waiting on the paperwork. The paperwork had been waiting on them.

In April 2025, six months before El Fasher fell, the RSF stormed the camp. The UN Human Rights Office later documented more than 1,000 civilians killed. Hundreds of them were summarily executed. People were killed in the market. A market is where a besieged population keeps the last thread of an ordinary life, and the logic of a siege is to find every thread a people have left and cut it. More than 400,000 people were driven out within days, toward Tawila and into El Fasher — a city that was already starving, and that would fall with them still inside it.

The UN would later say that what was done in the city mirrored what had been done in the camp. I do not think Zamzam was a prelude. I think Zamzam was El Fasher, rehearsed first on people the world had already quietly decided it could afford to lose.

The fall

By the last week of October 2025, what remained of El Fasher had gone 18 months without reliable food, without medicine, cut off from the rest of the country the way you cut a limb off and tell yourself the body will manage. They had pushed earth up around it, and people who tried to leave were shot along that earth. The final offensive ran from October 24 to 30. The killing crested on October 26. The army’s retreat is dated to October 27. I am writing on the second of those days, a year on, and I still do not know what an anniversary is supposed to accomplish for the dead, except to force the living to do the arithmetic again, out loud, on a date.

When the garrison left, the plan reached the end it had been built for.

A city is rooms, with people inside them who had, until recently, every reason to believe the rooms would hold.

On October 26, RSF fighters turned heavy weapons on about 1,000 people sheltering in Al-Rashid dormitory at El Fasher University. Witnesses, independent of each other, put the dead in that room at around 500. The UN’s report records another mass killing at the university the same day: around 600 people executed where they had taken shelter, about 50 of them children.

Two days later, fighters went into the Saudi Maternity Hospital — the last hospital in the city still working, in a place whose clinics had already been hit again and again since the siege began. The World Health Organization’s count is no fewer than 460 people — patients, and those who had stayed to care for them instead of fleeing. A hospital is where a person goes because some part of them still believes, against everything, that there is one room left that will not be turned into this. El Fasher did not have that room left. Not one.

Then the numbers, which are not one number.

Everyone wants a figure that can be defended. That is what a fact-check wants. It is, God forgive me, what my own training as a journalist wants. In February 2026, the UN Human Rights Office published what it could document from more than 140 survivors and witnesses: at least 4,400 people killed inside the city between October 25 and 27, and more than 1,600 killed on the roads as they tried to leave. In the same breath, in the same finding, it said the real toll of that week was undoubtedly higher. The hospital is not inside those three days. October 28 sits outside them. So does everything the interviews could not reach, which is most of what happened.

Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, reading the ground from orbit because no one could walk it and live, identified at least 150 clusters of objects consistent with human remains between October 26 and November 28. The same report said the images could not be turned into a count. It assessed that the RSF had likely killed tens of thousands — burning, burying, moving bodies until piles visible one week were gone the next.

The Guardian, on December 5, reported a closed briefing to British MPs. Sarah Champion, who chairs the House of Commons International Development Committee, said an academic there had called 60,000 killed in three weeks a low estimate. Not a figure Parliament adopted. Not Yale’s figure. Not the UN’s. One is a documented minimum for three days, and it distrusts itself. One is a month of disposal, and it refuses to be a toll. One is an estimate offered in private, for a different stretch of days. Defend any of them as the number and you have given it work it cannot do.

I used to want the distance between them to prove a last stage of the operation: an arithmetic made impossible on purpose, so the argument would never close. I cannot show that order. I won’t invent it. There was a systematic effort, visible from space, to manage the dead. There is, a year later, a quarrel about which figure may be said out loud. A massacre everyone can settle on a number for is a massacre someone has lost control of. That sentence is mine. The record’s sentence is the gap, and the gap needs a different word than killing.

Mustafa Hijazi, the Lebanese psychologist whose work on the psychology of oppression is widely read across the Arab world, spent a career trying to build a vocabulary for what long oppression does to a person, and English has no clean twin for the word he eventually chose. He did not use it in the book that made his name. That book was about qahr: oppression, subjugation, a pressure that at least still recognizes you enough to require your submission. Decades later he decided qahr was not a wide enough net, and he reached for hadr. He meant something beyond subjugation: the withdrawal of recognition altogether. A life converted, as he put it, into a discarded number. He was writing about poverty, and dictatorship, and what the long afterlife of colonization does to a person’s sense of being worth counting at all. He was not writing about mass graves. I do not know a better word for a human being caught between 4,400 and an estimate of 60,000 that no office will sign. Qahr killed them. Hadr is what the rest of us do to them afterward, every time we let the counting stand in for the reckoning.

A year on, Amnesty International — from testimony gathered in August and September 2026 — cites figures from humanitarian organizations working in the city: fewer than 70,000 people still there, against a pre-war population of more than a million. I am not going to subtract one from the other and call the result the missing. “Pre-war” and the day the siege closed were not the same city. People had already fled into El Fasher from the rest of Darfur and stayed. The dead, the fled, and the remaining do not resolve. Neither confirmed dead nor confirmed living, they remain an absence where a population stood, without even the dignity of a number.

Disappearing

Hadr was not only done to the dead. Some of it was done to me, and I am done leaving that implied.

I disappeared the way I have disappeared before. Not with any ceremony. A thread slipping loose somewhere behind the sternum, so quietly that you only notice it afterward, the way you only notice you were holding your breath once you have already let it out. I stopped answering messages. I let the phone ring itself out. I told people I was working, and some days that was even true, in the way that keeping your hands busy can be true while the rest of you has already left the room. Mostly I was just gone. A street can look fully occupied from the outside while every house on it has quietly, completely emptied.

I am Sudanese, and I have watched enough other Sudanese people do this exact thing by now to know it is not a personal failing. It is what happens when a body finally runs out of the part of itself that knows how to grieve in public, in real time, on a schedule, while the people around you expect you to produce an explanation for numbers that should never have required an explanation from anyone.

I only found a name for it years after I had already lived it. Not in the later book, the one about hadr, but in the earlier one, which Hijazi wrote on what it does to the inside of a person to live under someone else’s boot. He called it escape — one of exactly two moves left open to anyone who has run entirely out of room to fight back. The other, he wrote, is identification: borrowing the logic of whoever is crushing you, because at least their logic still has power running through it, and yours, by that point, has none. I took the first. I have spent this year looking, longer than I wanted to, at men who took the second.

He had another name, from that same book, for the month I had after the city fell. A disturbance of continuity. The past stops leading anywhere, and the future stops being a place you are still allowed to arrive at. You live inside a fog with no before and no after, an unbearable present you survive one hour at a time, and nothing more ambitious than that. He did not write it about me. I do not know a more exact description of the month I had.

We keep calling this resilience. I have come to hate that word. It gets handed to us like a compliment, by the same hand that keeps doing the breaking. Nobody told me, when El Fasher fell, that it was allowed — that it was all right — to simply stop. So if you are the kind of person who disappears the way I do: it was all right. It still is.

What brought me back was not a decision, because I do not think I had one left to make. It was smaller than that. A friend who kept texting me without once asking for anything back. Someone who called and stayed on the line while I said almost nothing at all, for as long as I needed to say nothing. I have come to believe that is the only cure there actually is for this particular kind of disappearing. Not time. Never time. Someone who simply refuses to let your silence mean that you are gone. It is the same republic: people who decide, without being asked, that you still count.

I am writing this because the people who died in that dormitory, and in that hospital, and the women this war has tried to silence by the oldest means it has, do not get to wait until I feel ready. The only thing I have left to offer them, from this distance, in this language, is a record. This happened. Here. To people who had names. Somebody’s son. Somebody’s patient. Somebody’s entire reason for getting up that morning. The record does not stop at the rooms. It has to say what the land had been prepared, for years, to allow inside them.

What the land was for

The dead in El Fasher were mostly Zaghawa. The dead in El Geneina, in 2023, were mostly Masalit. Both are non-Arab peoples of Darfur, and the men with the rifles treated that fact as the whole explanation. I have never found a history that lets it be.

Witnesses say the fighters moving through the city had already decided, before they arrived, that no one left inside counted as a civilian. Everyone who remained was a soldier, in their language. That sentence is not a description of a battlefield. It is a permission slip — the same permission slip Khartoum wrote for Darfur in 2003, the campaign the world eventually agreed to call genocide, back when it needed men willing to burn a village all the way down so its people could never come back and call it theirs again.

The British, once Ali Dinar was dead, did not see a plantation, the way they saw the cotton at Gezira. They saw a buffer: men recruited cheaply, a population run through chiefs — nazir, omda, sheikh — paid a salary and told the office was tradition. It was administration, with a tribal face. Mahmood Mamdani, in Citizen and Subject, calls the result a bifurcated state. Citizens at the center, who can reach a court. Subjects at the edge, who can reach a chief set over them and nobody else. Birth decided whether a grievance would ever arrive somewhere built to hear it. The arrangement outlived the British by 60 years. Darfur is where it still tests what it can get away with.

Land and water were real grievances, and so was a Sahara moving south. Hunger is not a metaphor. For decades they passed through a system that could see a person only as a tribe. Khartoum armed the men who held the grievance, gave them a story about which neighbors were properly Sudanese, and called that a policy. Not an ancient hatred of herders and farmers, turning itself on. A state, burning the cheapest fuel it had.

In the man with the rifle, Hijazi’s second move is what the fuel feels like. Identification: you adopt the logic that broke you, because no other logic has looked like power, and you aim it sideways — at whoever has less cover than you — rather than up, at the room that armed you. Recognition, the first move, is a resistance committee, the kind that organized neighborhoods in 2019, or a kettle at a gate no ministry appointed. What was done to you was built, and built things can be unmade. Both moves come from the same neglect. They live on the same streets.

Abu Lulu

In the last week of October, one of those streets had a man on it with a camera.

Abu Lulu’s name is Al-Fateh Abdullah Idris. He filmed himself executing civilians in El Fasher. Reuters has verified four videos of him, on October 27, shooting at least 15 unarmed captives. All of them were in civilian clothes.

He had been filming for months before that. In August, inside the city, he questioned a trader who owned a restaurant and asked the man’s tribe. The man said he did not know where the army’s commander was. He said he had a restaurant. Sudans Post and Al Jazeera do not fully agree on the name he gave when the question came. They agree on the kind of answer the question was built to pull out of him — a non-Arab person of Darfur — and they agree on what happened next. Abu Lulu shot him at close range. He told the camera that since the Rapid Support Forces had existed, he had never spared a prisoner. Not one.

He kept filming as the city fell. On a livestream he said he had killed more than 2,000 people, lost count, and would begin again at zero. BBC Verify recorded what he said to a man who was begging, and a fighter beside him who tried to step in. The captive had pleaded that they knew each other, that he had called out to him days before. Abu Lulu waved the fighter off. “I will never have mercy,” he said. “Our job is only killing.”

I keep coming back to the word job. Not grief, which would have had a dead person of his own somewhere behind it. Not a feud a family could tell you the beginning of. Not an order he could later say he hated and followed anyway. The job.

In the hours before there was an arrest or a statement, I watched accounts loyal to the RSF celebrate him. They called him faris, knight, and turned him into generated images, copper, a figure for a monument rather than a charge sheet. On the livestream where he boasted of the 2,000, men attached to the force called him a hero. Where there was anger, the anger was that he kept filming, not that he kept shooting. They were saying what he did was all right.

He had already done this in public in August. The handcuffs didn’t appear until the end of October, after the videos from the fall had gone around the world and the force needed to be seen taking account of something. A spokesman said Abu Lulu had never been inside the RSF’s command. An allied militia leader, in their telling, who had borrowed the name. There was an arrest, and handcuffs for the cameras, and a promised investigation.

Gedo Hamdan Abu Nashuk, the RSF’s commander for North Darfur, was walking with Abu Lulu on the morning of October 27. Reuters put him within 40 meters of two of the executions, in the same two-hour window. That same day the Centre for Information Resilience placed Abdelrahim Dagalo — Hemedti’s brother, and the force’s deputy — inside the headquarters of the 6th Infantry Division while the city was being taken.

The Security Council sanctioned Abu Lulu in February 2026, together with Dagalo and two other commanders.

In May 2026, Reuters reported that he was out and fighting. Nine sources described a release and a return to the front in Kordofan. Three of them — an RSF commander, an officer close to the leadership, and a researcher in contact with the committee charged with investigating him — said Abdelrahim Dagalo gave the order. Separately, another commander and a relative said he was released on the condition that he not film and not be filmed. Reuters did not establish that those were Dagalo’s words. The RSF called the report of a release completely false: he had remained in custody since the arrest, the force said, and he would face a special court with the others accused of violations in El Fasher.

They are arguing about where he is being kept. They are not arguing about the man who said he had a restaurant.

I used to think the worst of what this does to a man was his honest belief that he had done nothing wrong. The belief is real. I watched people mean it. What I no longer think is that the institution needs the belief. It can let fighters call a man a knight, and let a spokesman say the man was never theirs. If the sources are right and the denial is not, it can have the deputy commander free him and then tell the public he is still in the cell. He did not arrive over El Fasher out of nowhere. He is what a long series of reasonable decisions, each of them made in a room, leaves standing in a street.

I understood the rooms differently after I heard him. Not as what happens when fighters lose their heads on the day a garrison falls. The garrison was what the army was holding. The 18 months before it fell were pointed at something else — a population that would not be able to stay, or come back, or keep a market, or trust a hospital that still believed it was a hospital. They attacked Zamzam’s market in April. They shot the roads in October. The ward was two days after the dormitory. At the end of that, the roads are still there, and the gold is still there, and there are fewer people left who can stand on either of them and say the place is theirs.

That is hadr worked from the other direction. A government can spend generations deciding which of its people are citizens and which are only fuel, and some of the fuel will do the violence and experience it as the way the world has always been. Nothing in that sentence defends a dormitory or a hospital. It refuses the easier account, in which the evil of those rooms needs no past.

Abu Aqla Keikal commanded RSF forces in Gezira until he defected to the army in October 2024. Fighters under him are accused of mass rape in the towns they held. He is not a clean witness. In May 2025, in a closed meeting with journalists in Port Sudan, he said Hemedti ran the war himself — the calls, the ammunition, the uniforms — and that when the rapes were put in front of him, the tears came and the words did not. He said he had not commented on the silence. His office, the same day, called the published account excerpted and fabricated, and promised a tape. I have not seen the tape. I will not build a commander’s knowledge on a story his own office disowned. I will not pretend the story was never told.

The pay does not depend on it.

The RSF lacks the things that matter in an army here: wages that arrive whether or not you steal, and a court that can overrule your commander. Men who have worn the uniform describe being paid late, or in money the war has already destroyed, or not paid, and sent to take the rest from the battlefield — ransom, gold, whatever a town still contains. That is the wage, not a problem the wage is waiting out. Try Abu Lulu honestly, all the way down, and the tribunal has to ask his whole rank the question the videos already asked in public. There is not enough rope in Darfur for that answer. You would not be disciplining a fighter. You would be indicting the pay that keeps him facing your direction. That is the old meaning of militia, whatever it is wearing: it answers to whoever pays it this week, and both of the things it exists to do — fight, and extract — require that nobody above the fighter can tell him no and be obeyed. Darfur had not been given the courts the center was given. The RSF did not invent the absence. It enlarged it, from a province stripped without an accounting to a force that strips without one. The design held. The uniform changed.

One floor higher, the failure is different, and I won’t write it as if it were. Since 2005 the International Criminal Court has had jurisdiction over Darfur, on a referral from the Security Council. On October 6, 2025, three weeks before El Fasher fell — not during the week of the offensive — it convicted Ali Kushayb, a Janjaweed commander, for killings and other crimes committed in 2003 and 2004. The sentence came in December. It is the only conviction that mandate has produced. In January 2026 the deputy prosecutor told the Council that her office assessed war crimes and crimes against humanity in the capture of the city, and was working toward individual responsibility. The lag is shameful on its own: a verdict about the previous war, delivered while this one was still starving a city, and a briefing months later still at the work of naming commanders. It is not the same act as killing people and then denying the count. The two acts land on the same dead. That is the charge. Coordination is a different allegation, and I don’t have it.

El Fasher was the last ground the army held in Darfur. Whoever held it held the gold there, and the roads out to Chad and Libya, and the buyers who have not needed to ask where the metal came from. The RSF inherited that use of the land. A buffer you can take from is worth more, to whoever controls it, than a buffer left in peace. I cannot make every line of that inheritance neat. I can say what stood at the end of the line. A city starved for a year and a half. A camp next to it where, months before famine was a word anyone official would use, the children were already being counted by the hour.

The women who absorb it

What I know about the cost of a closed room, I did not learn from a report.

My mother was pregnant with me, and still finishing her degree, when a government she had no hand whatsoever in choosing decided what the next decade of her life was going to cost her. Nobody consulted her in the room where that decision was made. Nobody ever does. She carried both of us through everything that came after, the pregnancy and the degree both, because someone in that room had decided she only got to keep one of the two, and she declined to agree. I have no more complicated word for it than that.

I did not understand, until much later, that this was not only her story. It is the only story I have ever actually learned how to tell about Sudanese women, and it has been true, without a single exception, of every one I have met since this war began. A decision is made in a room none of them were in. A militia is outsourced instead of disbanded. A shipment of weapons clears a port where nobody asks the hard question. An arms embargo is debated for another month, because another month of debating it costs the people in the room nothing. Far from that room, a woman absorbs what was decided. Not as a symbol of anything. With her body, and her time, and the work she had been studying toward before the decision arrived and insisted on coming first.

This is the part of hadr that does not need a massacre to operate. It is what gets done, every day, more quietly, to the living women left holding what the dead left behind. The labor doubles, because a closed room created it. Then the doubled labor is praised as strength, and nobody asks who gave the room the right to decide any of it without her sitting there.

Rape as a weapon of siege is not new. The RSF has found a crueler practice of an argument Sudanese women have already been winning, slowly, for longer than this force has existed in any uniform. Absorbing a decision made in your absence is not the same thing as agreeing to it. It is never the same thing.

I am not interested, tonight, in performing a hope I do not feel. I am angry, and I intend to go on being angry. Anger is the only thing still standing upright in me, after everything else that was supposed to carry me through this year has given out underneath me. I still don’t know what the word anniversary is supposed to do. I know what she did.

She did not wait for anyone’s permission to decide when she was finished absorbing what other people had signed. If hadr is what was done to El Fasher — a people reduced to a disputed figure, an absence the world still cannot agree how to count — then refusing it is not a speech. It is her, decades on, still finishing what she started. Still here. A woman insisting, against every room that ever tried to decide otherwise, on being counted as a person, and not as an outcome.