A year ago, a city most people outside Sudan had never heard of became, for a few weeks, a story the world paid attention to. El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, had been under siege by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces for eighteen months. On 26 October 2025, RSF fighters stormed the headquarters of the Sudanese army's 6th Infantry Division inside the city. The next day, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, chairman of Sudan's Sovereign Council, confirmed his troops had withdrawn. The last major government-held city in Darfur had fallen.
What came after is why the city's name is still attached to the word genocide. The UN's human rights office documented mass killings, summary executions and what it called ethnically motivated reprisals, both inside El Fasher and in the nearby town of Bara, where at least fifty civilians were killed in a matter of days, among them five Sudanese Red Crescent volunteers. Martha Pobee, the UN's Assistant Secretary-General for Africa, told the Security Council at the time that the fall was "a significant shift in the security dynamics" with implications for the country and the wider region that were "profound". By February 2026, UN investigators were using a different word: they said they had found "hallmarks of genocide" in the killings and the targeting of specific communities.
The war did not end there. It moved.
A year on, Sudan's civil war — Sudanese Armed Forces against the Rapid Support Forces, fighting since April 2023 over what was meant to be a transition to civilian rule — has not resolved. It has shifted ground.
In North Kordofan, the army holds the road corridor between Khartoum and El Obeid and a string of towns it retook in late July, but the RSF keeps contesting the corridor, and El Obeid itself is described by UN monitors as under "siege-like conditions", short of water and facing a cholera outbreak. In Blue Nile, an alliance of the RSF and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-North took the towns of Kurmuk and Geissan in mid- August and claimed two army bases by early September. On 4 September the state capital, Ed Damazin, came under direct assault, including drone strikes.
The toll nationally is harder to pin down than any single battle, because the organisations counting it do not all count the same thing. The UN Security Council's own monitoring puts twenty million people in acute hunger, fourteen million displaced, and two hundred thousand at the most severe stage of starvation classification. A separate account, from the Catholic news agency Fides reporting on Darfur specifically, describes "tens of thousands" killed and thirteen million displaced across the country as a whole, with Darfur alone hosting around sixty-five per cent of Sudan's 8.6 million internally displaced people. We have not reconciled these figures against each other. They come from different organisations counting different things at different times, and presenting one as more authoritative than the other would overstate what either actually establishes.
What both agree on is the direction: people are still being driven from their homes, in large numbers, and the town absorbing the largest share of those fleeing Darfur is Tawila, which the International Organization for Migration says now shelters more than seven hundred thousand displaced people, with healthcare, food, nutrition and water services all described as critically short.
Why we looked at El Fasher ourselves
We hold no reporters in Darfur and no access to the commercial, sub-metre satellite imagery that specialist investigators have used to document specific burned neighbourhoods and detention sites inside El Fasher. What we can do is the same thing we do for claims closer to home: take the free, public Sentinel-2 archive, find cloud-free passes either side of a dated event, and look.
El Fasher sits in a part of Sudan with very little cloud cover most of the year, which made this easier than it usually is for us. We found a clear pass on 27 September 2025, four weeks before the city fell; a clear pass on 27 October 2025, the day it fell; and a clear pass almost exactly a year later, on 12 October 2026. All three show the same ground at the same scale.
At the level a city-wide comparison can show — a flattened neighbourhood, a wholesale burn scar, a vanished district — El Fasher looks much the same across all three dates. We measured this rather than relying on our own eyes: comparing the two dates either side of the city's fall produced less pixel-level change, not more, than comparing two ordinary dates earlier in the same month, before the siege ended. Most of what did change was concentrated in vegetation outside the built-up area, consistent with the ordinary seasonal transition from Sudan's rains to its dry season rather than with anything that happened in the city.
This is not a finding that nothing happened. It is a finding about what our instrument can see. A ten-metre pixel shows you a building; it does not show you who was inside it, and it does not show you a targeted killing, a detention, or an act of sexual violence — which is what the United Nations says actually happened in El Fasher. Treat the picture above as what it is: evidence that the city was not razed, and no evidence at all about the things that made its name a byword for this war's cruelty.
What to watch
General al-Burhan has ruled out talks. Speaking in the northern town of Amri on 12 October, he said: "We say it again: we have no negotiations with anyone, we are not speaking with anyone, and we have nothing to do with anyone." He said the army would fight until it defeats the RSF "across Darfur, Kordofan and Blue Nile" — naming the three regions where the war is now actually being fought, a year after Darfur's last government stronghold fell.
Separately, the quadrilateral declaration issued by Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia on 4 October — which we checked in detail elsewhere — commits its signatories to Sudan's "unity, sovereignty, territorial integrity and national institutions" and rejects "the establishment of any parallel entities", language aimed at the RSF's rival civilian administration without naming it, alongside a rejection of "any support for mercenaries" that names no country either. Whether that declaration changes anything on the ground in Kordofan or Blue Nile is, like most of what four governments agree to on paper, a separate question from what they do next.