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Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab has released evidence showing the Rapid Support Forces have begun mass killings following their capture of El-Fasher in North Darfur, Sudan.

The lab’s satellite and open-source data analysis corroborates reports of killings across civilian neighborhoods, multiple hospital sites and along the borders of the city of those attempting to flee.

“Individuals on the ground sent a message that reached us Monday morning that 1,200 were dead,” Nathaniel Raymond, the lab’s executive director, said. “By that evening, they said 10,000. By Tuesday, we couldn’t reach them anymore. We assume our ground contacts are dead.”

In July 2023, the lab — which has also conducted research in recent years about Russia’s kidnapping of Ukrainian children — began warning of an attack on El-Fasher. In the two and a half years since, it has reached the United Nations Security Council six times; sent warnings to the U.S. National Security Council, National Intelligence Council and State Department; and produced over 60 reports on the war in Sudan.

This week, the lab released its first report on the mass killings on Monday, describing the presence of Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, performing house-to-house clearance operations in the Daraja Oula neighborhood. Image analysis showed RSF vehicles, some mounted with guns, blocking side streets as well as objects the size of human bodies and reddish earth discoloration on the ground near the vehicles.

The lab documented the same human-body-sized objects and red discoloration near the earthen walls, or berm, surrounding the city, consistent with reports of executions of people attempting to flee by crossing it.

“I haven’t seen violence like this since Rwanda. The velocity and ferocity of the RSF killing civilians since Sunday is unlike anything I’ve seen in 26 years of doing this work, and HRL has been reporting on the RSF and the Sudanese war for a while,” Raymond said.

Its second report, released on Tuesday, found evidence of systematic mass killings at a maternity hospital, a former children’s hospital turned detention center, and the berm outside of El-Fasher. The maternity hospital was the city’s last operational hospital. 

From satellite imagery, the report cites lines of dark-colored objects in the children’s hospital compound that are consistent with dead human bodies. It also cites videos of RSF soldiers executing civilians within a hospital, taken and posted by the soldiers themselves.

War in Sudan

The ongoing war in Sudan, which broke out in April 2023, has killed over 150,000 civilians and displaced 14 million people, according to the BBC. 

The main conflict is between the paramilitary RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces, or SAF, for control over the country. The RSF, led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo and financially backed by the United Arab Emirates, grew out of the Janjaweed militia that perpetrated the Darfur genocide in 2003.

“The groups that have been rallied to fight are doubtlessly trying to settle scores, and some wish to ethnically cleanse northern Darfur in order to complete the Arab Gathering project which seeks to bring Arab groups spread across the Sahel into north Darfur to settle,” Alden Young, an associate professor of history and global affairs, wrote in a text to the News.

The city of El-Fasher was the last SAF stronghold in Darfur. It had withstood an 18-month siege before finally falling to the RSF this Sunday, according to a U.N. report.

The Humanitarian Research Lab has worked on documenting the war in Sudan since it began in 2023, including the documentation of the El-Geneina massacre in June 2023. That attack saw the killing of between 10,0000 and 15,000 civilians, most belonging to the Massalit tribe in West Darfur, according to a Human Rights Watch report.

“We are absolutely seeing the same patterns of violence — the systemic, ethnic-based violence — today in El-Fasher as we saw two years ago against the Massalit community in West Darfur, and also 20 years ago in the Darfur genocide,” Kholood Khair, a peace fellow at the Jackson School of Global Affairs, said.

‘We just didn’t care enough’

Raymond condemned the broader international inaction that has allowed the violence to escalate unchecked. He said that governments such as those of the United States and the United Kingdom have prioritized maintaining economic and security relationships with the United Arab Emirates over the lives of the Sudanese people.

Raymond expressed his hopes for President Donald Trump to make an announcement to RSF and the UAE that the United States has drones over El-Fasher collecting information about the war crimes being committed. He emphasized that the United States has not placed sanctions on the UAE.

“The reason that we are where we are is that we just didn’t care enough,” Raymond said. “The survival of these people, their lives, matter less than our economic and security relationships with the UAE, and that’s why these people are dying.”

He noted that despite the rising numbers of atrocities being committed in Sudan over the last two years, there have been no major protests on Yale’s campus and limited momentum across U.S. campuses.

Raymond urged students to mobilize with the same energy that once defined the Save Darfur movement two decades ago, where activists across U.S. universities created broad-based, bipartisan support through protest.

“I don’t think Yale students know how powerful they are. They’re very powerful, if they choose to be,” Raymond said.

The Humanitarian Research Lab is part of the Yale School of Public Health.