In a harrowing continuation of violence in Darfur, Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are accused by the Sudan Doctors Network of executing 13 civilians—five children, four women, and four elderly—on August 24, 2025, along a key road between el-Fasher and Tweila.
This attack closely followed the RSF’s shelling of a hospital in el-Fasher that wounded several patients, including a pregnant woman and a child. The Doctors Network lamented that these killings appear ethnically motivated, befitting a broader pattern of targeting unarmed non-combatants in a campaign that could now be defined as ethnic cleansing or even genocide, amid RSF’s intensified push to seize el-Fasher, the Sudanese military’s final stronghold in Darfur.
This atrocity unfolds within a wider siege of suffering: between August 11–20, the United Nations documented the RSF’s killing of at least 89 civilians—including 16 who were summarily executed in el-Fasher and in the nearby Abu Shouk displacement camp—with the true toll likely higher. Since the civil war erupted in April 2023, the conflict has wrought unimaginable devastation—over 40,000 dead, more than 14 million displaced, and famine spreading, while the International Criminal Court investigates alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.