It unfolded in plain sight over 18 months. The city of El Fasher in the Darfur region of Sudan, besieged by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), fell to the militia group last week, and what has followed is a catastrophe.

Mass killings are under way. There are reports that in one maternity hospital alone almost 500 people – patients and their families – were killed. The few that managed to escape tell of summary executions of civilians. The RSF has embarked on a killing spree of civilians so severe that images of blood saturating the ground have been picked up by satellite. The speed and intensity of the killings in the immediate aftermath of the fall of El Fasher has already been compared by war monitors to the first 24 hours of the Rwandan genocide.

This is the culmination of a campaign that had walled in the population of the city – hundreds of thousands of people – and reduced it to starvation. Those who attempted to flee risked death and rape, and those that remained were bombed and surviving on nothing more than animal feed.

El Fasher was the Sudanese military’s last remaining stronghold in Darfur, and this past week marks a grave turning point in Sudan’s war. Now two and a half years long, the fight for control of the country between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the RSF has been brutal and relentless.

Previously partners in government, the two parties ruled in a tense coalition with civilians after a popular revolution overthrew president Omar al-Bashir in 2019. The parties then turned on the civilians, before turning on each other. When it came, their confrontation was explosive; a revelation of........

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