Is there any way out of Sudan’s nightmare?

Sudanese Students from schools in the East Nile region of the capital, hold up the Sudan flag during a protest against violations committed by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) against the people of El-Fasher in Khartoum on November 3, 2025.

For the past two and a half years, events in war-torn Sudan have been characterized by wild swings — not only between which side in the conflict has the upper hand, but between moments of tentative hope and outright despair.

Could that be the case this week, as one of the war’s darkest moments was followed by at least a tiny step toward peace?

The nadir was reached last week, when the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) — the paramilitary group that controls much of the west of the country — finally seized the city of El Fasher, the Sudanese army’s last remaining stronghold in the Darfur region, after an 18 month siege aimed at starving out the city’s resistance. (The RSF is the descendant of the infamous Janjaweed militias accused of atrocities during the mid-2000s Darfur genocide.)

Local and international officials had been raising the alarm since last year of a likely massacre if El Fasher fell, and while information about what’s happening inside the city is still limited, there’s reason to believe the worst, including what appear to be piles of bodies and bloodstains on the ground visible from space. Reports from survivors, as well as grisly videos posted online, attest to widespread killings and mass rape.

Arjan Hehenkamp, the Darfur crisis leader for the the NGO International Rescue Committee who was recently on the ground in Tawila — the nearby city to which El Fasher residents have fled — told Vox this week that the most disturbing thing he saw was how few of the expected number of displaced people they’ve seen, and in particular, how few adult men.

“The fact that they’re coming in such a small number is a story in and of itself,” Hehenkamp said. “It raises the question, ‘Where is the rest of the population of El Fasher?’”

Also this week, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the leading international authority on hunger crises, declared that a famine is taking place ins El Fasher, as well as in Kadguli, a city in Sudan’s central Kordofan region. That makes 2025 a rare year in which the IPC has declared a famine twice after declaring it for parts of Gaza in August.

At the same time, there was a small sign of political progress on Thursday when the RSF announced it would agree to a