For months now, Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), an independent military force, together with allied armed groups, have been besieging the city of el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur. If the city falls, this would likely kick off yet another wave of killings. This is happening in the total absence of any UN or other international or regional presence mandated to protect the civilian population there.

RSF forces and affiliated armed groups have already killed thousands of mostly Massalit people in el-Geneina, West Darfur, and surrounding areas, forcing more than half a million people, mostly Massalit, to flee into neighbouring Chad. The risk now is that they will take aim at the hundreds of thousands of displaced people who, fleeing the violence in other places in Darfur, have found refuge in el-Fasher.

Reading horrifying new developments in Darfur draws my mind back to July 2023, when my colleagues and I travelled to eastern Chad to gather evidence of mass killings in el-Geneina.

On a hot day in July, my interpreter and I were walking in the arid outskirts of the small town of Adré in eastern Chad, where hundreds of thousands of people, mostly ethnic Massalit women and children, were staying, having fled the violence in West Darfur. Men were noticeably absent. Families were living in makeshift shelters consisting of four sticks and a piece of tarp, which hardly protected them from the scorching sun or torrential rains. There was almost no access to electricity, running water, or regular food provision.

My interpreter, a leading member of the Massalit human rights community in el-Geneina, knew practically everyone. Every few minutes our walk through this enormous makeshift settlement was punctuated by the........

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