The world has known about the disaster of El Fasher for more than a year.

The city was the last redoubt of Sudan’s armed forces in the western region of Darfur, which had otherwise mostly fallen under the sway of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces since the ruinous civil war between the two rival factions flared in 2023.

A baby who fled El Fasher with family receives treatment at a camp in nearby Tawila on Sunday.Credit: AP

For 18 months, the residents of El Fasher, once a regional capital of over a million people, endured a gruelling siege, punctuated by massacres and other atrocities carried out by the RSF’s fighters.

No humanitarian aid could get in, and the attackers walled off the city with a sand berm. A full-blown famine hit the communities trapped within and in nearby displacement camps. Locals subsisted off animal feed, weeds and peanut shells. The desperate entreaties of United Nations officials to the international community fell on deaf ears.

In the past week, things took an all-the-more hideous turn in El Fasher. RSF units broke through and have captured the city, triggering the panicked flight of its remaining starving civilians.

The victorious militias, which are predominantly ethnically Arab, have gone on a shocking killing rampage of the local non-Arab population. The violence echoes the genocidal slaughters carried out by the Janjaweed militia – the RSF’s predecessor – in Darfur two decades ago.

Eyewitnesses reported numerous incidents of summary executions, rapes and other abuse. The latest brutality follows the RSF’s earlier campaigns in other parts of Darfur, which led to the Biden administration on its way out of office declaring that the group was guilty of acts of........

© The Sydney Morning Herald