No Exit from El Fasher

NEWSROOM: WAR WINNERS
Co-published with
May 14, 2026

“No Exit from El Fasher” is an intimate look at the survival of civilians who lived through an unimaginable monthslong siege and final dayslong assault on the Sudanese city of El Fasher in North Darfur.

The city of El Fasher in North Darfur, Sudan, has been under siege for more than 1.5 years. The paramilitary troops of the Rapid Support Forces had encircled the last stronghold of the Sudanese Army in the western region and bombarded, shelled and starved the hundreds of thousands of civilians who were trapped in the city.

Sudan has been torn apart by war since April 2023, when a power struggle between two generals – the head of the Sudanese Armed Forces and the leader of the RSF – devolved into a war. There is no end in sight after many rounds of failed peace talks and the involvement of proxy actors fueling the fight. Over three years into Sudan’s brutal war, the true scale of significant battles and attacks on civilians, including the siege of El Fasher, remain unknown.

When the city fell into the hands of the RSF at the end of October 2025, the RSF killed thousands and potentially tens of thousands of people in a matter of days. It became one of the biggest massacres in the three year old civil war. Yet, little is known of what happened inside the city before and after the take over, how the massacre unfolded and what survivors experienced.

For this investigation we travelled to Uganda where the protagonists of the film fled after they escaped from El Fasher at various points through the siege. Their stories paint the picture of life in a besieged city: at first bombardment and civilians caught in the crossfire and then a deepening and strategic effort by the Rapid Support Forces to pen civilians in, trapped in their own city. The pacing of the documentary mirrors the slow encircling of the city as the RSF built a berm to prevent medical supplies and food from entering the city, an effort to pressure the Army and civilians left inside and a means to control the flow of civilians attempting to flee.

The survivors interviewed by Lighthouse Reports, Fault Lines, and Sudan War Monitor tell harrowing stories of limited options: stay inside the city and starve or risk traveling over the RSF-berm encircling the entire city and face possible extortion, harassment or worse, execution. The story of one survivor and her daughter lays bare tactics including the widespread use of rape as a tool of war by the RSF in El Fasher and across Darfur. The story of another mother missing her son delves into the widespread use of abduction and detention wielded by the RSF in El Fasher. Their testimonies are confirmed by work from Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders who operated clinics across Darfur and investigated the scale of the use of rape against women and girls in Darfur.

While the true death toll might never be known, there are some clues that reveal the scale of the killings. We gathered the IDs of over one hundred Sudanese people who were killed as they tried to escape EL Fasher, through sensitive reporting with sources including body collectors who were made to bury the dead after the fall of the city. Many of the documents were splattered with blood. Among the deaths are men, women and children as young as four.

METHODS

For the film and the story in Sudan War Monitor, we interviewed survivors, eye witnesses and RSF-insiders who were present during the siege of El Fasher. They told us, among other things, how the berm that the RSF had built, kept them inside the city.

We mapped the construction of the berm around El Fasher by reviewing hundreds of satellite images captured between April and October 2025, using Planet Labs imagery, Sentinel-2 data, and high resolution imagery from Vantor.

By comparing successive images in QGIS, we were able track the sequence of construction with an estimated accuracy of a few days. In some images, active construction activity was also directly visible at the moment of capture, including excavators and other earthmoving activity. The mapped timeline was then animated using Blender to show the berm’s expansion over time.

STORYLINES

The reporting and documentary style is an effort to connect to the human cost of the RSF siege on El Fasher and the humanity of Sudanese civilians who lived through a brutal 18 month siege and the three-day nightmarish fall of the city in October 2026.

Ruqaya Jaber was born and raised in El Fasher and she fled the city on foot in late October, as the city fell to the RSF. Now living with several other women at Kiryandongo refugee settlement in Uganda, Ruqaya tells Lighthouse Reports and Fault Lines how she lost 12 members of her family and is still searching for her son, who was abducted by the RSF. She remembers the berm that encircled and starved her city and the fear of realising there might be no way out.

Halima Abdalla fled El Fasher with her four children one year before the city fell and after a brutal RSF attack on her family. Her then-seven-year-old daughter was raped by RSF soldier as her elder daughter tried to intervene. Her daughter is one of over 3,000 girls and women who were raped in Darfur during the course of the war. Still deeply traumatized by what her daughter and family experienced, she insisted on telling her story despite fear of retribution.

Abulgasam Sajw is a young citizen journalist who spent years documenting the RSF assault on the displacement camp he grew up in and in El Fasher.

Hadia Hasballah is a psychologist and counselor from Khartoum who fled several months into the war, her large family scattered in several countries. She established a women’s center in Kampala to support Sudanese women, continue the fight of the 2019 revolution, and support refugees. She leads sessions to help women from across Sudan process their trauma and hopes to go back to Sudan in order to finish the work of the revolution.

CO-PUBLICATIONS