El Fasher marks a year under the RSF, and the drones overhead are now the army’s
Amnesty International’s anniversary testimony describes detention, torture and pervasive fear. A Darfur outlet reports SAF drone strikes inside the city four days before the anniversary.
The RSF captured El Fasher, capital of North Darfur, on 26 October 2025. In a testimony-based report published on 23 October, Amnesty International said civilians in the city remain subject to unlawful killings, detention and torture, that surveillance and detentions are rife, that humanitarian access is limited and that the risk of child malnutrition remains high. “A pervasive pall of fear hangs over El Fasher today,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty’s secretary general. The documentary record of the fall itself is already established: the UN Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan concluded on 19 February 2026 that the takeover bore the “hallmarks of genocide” against Zaghawa and Fur communities, and described an 18-month siege that progressively cut civilians off from food, water and medical care.
Separately, the Darfur-focused outlet Darfur24 reported on 24 October that Sudanese army drones had carried out intensive strikes on several locations inside El Fasher on Thursday 22 October, killing and injuring both civilians and military personnel. The report cites unnamed local and medical sources, gives no casualty figures, and has not been matched by a second outlet in the material available. The New Arab, writing up the Amnesty findings on 24 October, described the city as a “ghost town”; it adds no independent reporting of its own.
Assessment: Note what is absent on the anniversary: an agreed death toll. Amnesty publishes none, the Fact-Finding Mission describes a pattern rather than a count, and the five- and six-figure numbers circulating online cannot be traced to a primary document. Treat any round number for El Fasher’s dead as unsourced until a named monitor stands behind it. The structural point is the one worth holding onto: a year after the RSF took the city by siege, the force reported to be bombing it is the national army, which makes El Fasher a test of whether “liberation” in this war means anything other than a change in who holds the drones.