The RSF is the Janjaweed with a Toyota fleet — and the 2003 playbook predicted El Fasher

Julie Flint and Alex de Waal documented the siege-and-starve pattern twenty years ago. The RSF used it again, in the same region, on the same population, with the same outcome.

Julie Flint and Alex de Waal documented the siege-and-starve pattern twenty years ago. The RSF used it again, in the same region, on the same population, with the same outcome.

El Fasher, the historical capital of the Fur sultanate and the administrative seat of North Darfur State, fell to the Rapid Support Forces in late October 2025 after an eighteen-month siege, its defences collapsing in the final offensive of 24-30 October. The U.N. human-rights office documented more than 6,000 people killed in the first three days, among the deadliest such intervals of any war in the post-Cold War period.[1][2] Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab, the U.N. Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the International Federation for Human Rights, and the African Center for Justice and Peace Studies have separately documented systematic ethnic targeting of the Zaghawa, Fur, and Berti populations in El Fasher and its outskirts in the days that followed. In February 2026 the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan concluded that the RSF's conduct in El Fasher bore the "hallmarks of genocide" against the Zaghawa and Fur, drawing on evidence that included the Yale lab's satellite analysis.[3]

The genocide finding was unsurprising in two senses. First, the United States had already determined, in January 2025, that the RSF had committed genocide in Sudan in the El Geneina and Ardamata atrocities of 2023.[4] Second, and this is the analytic point, the El Fasher siege played out almost exactly as Julie Flint and Alex de Waal had described the 2003-2005 Darfur genocide in *Darfur: A New History of a Long War*, which unpacked the Janjaweed siege-and-starve playbook in operational detail.[5] The methods were the same, the actors largely the same, the victims the same. The outside world's response was, to a remarkable degree, the same.

The most consequential analytic failure in the international coverage of the war has been the persistent framing of the Rapid Support Forces as a *new* paramilitary phenomenon: a state-licensed militia born of the Bashir-era restructuring of 2013, whose battlefield conduct flows from the contemporary command decisions of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo. The framing is wrong, and the error has had policy consequences. The RSF is not new. It is the post-2013 institutional form of the Janjaweed militias that conducted the 2003-2005 Darfur genocide. It inherited those militias' personnel, command culture, tactical doctrine, and ethnic-political agenda, and the playbook it has used since 2023 is, in identifiable detail, the one Flint and de Waal documented twenty years ago.

The continuity, in personnel and doctrine

The Rapid Support Forces were formally constituted on August 14, 2013, by presidential decree of Omar al-Bashir, under the operational command of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo. The decree restructured what the U.N. Panel of Experts on Sudan had previously catalogued as the Janjaweed: the irregular Arab tribal militias, principally drawn from the Mahamid section of the Rizeigat confederation and from the Beni Halba, that had conducted the 2003-2005 genocide under loose government direction.[6][7] The decree gave the Janjaweed a uniform, a rank structure, a national-budget line, and a chain of command running through the National Intelligence and Security Service. It did not change the personnel. The Janjaweed commanders who had directed the village-burnings in West Darfur in 2003-04 became RSF officers; Dagalo himself, then in his early thirties, had commanded a Janjaweed unit under Sheikh Musa Hilal in the original campaign.[7]

The doctrine the RSF brought to the 2023 war was, in operational terms, a direct continuation of the 2003 doctrine, refined by twenty years of practice in Darfur, by deployment to Yemen alongside Saudi-Emirati coalition forces from 2015-2019, and by the suppression of the 2019 democratic uprising in Khartoum (where the RSF's Khartoum Massacre on June 3, 2019 killed at least 128 protestors). The constituent elements:

- *Mobility*: the RSF, like the Janjaweed before it, fights as a Toyota-technical force, principally using Hilux pickup trucks mounted with 12.7mm or 14.5mm machine guns, occasionally with light anti-aircraft guns or recoilless rifles. Operational range is restricted only by fuel; the force is fast, dispersed, and very hard to fix in place for conventional counter-attack.[6]

- *Asymmetric ethnic targeting*: in any operation against a contested town, the RSF separates Arab from non-Arab populations, attacks the non-Arab population principally, and presents the operation publicly as a security action against "outlaws" or "armed rebels." Flint and de Waal documented the pattern exhaustively for 2003-05; the U.N. and Yale's research lab have documented it again for 2023-25.[5][3]

- *Siege-and-starve*: where a town cannot be taken by direct assault, the RSF surrounds it, cuts off food and water supplies, conducts artillery and drone strikes on the population, prevents humanitarian convoys from arriving, and waits. This was the El Geneina and Kabkabiya playbook in 2003-04; it was the El Fasher playbook in 2024-25.[3][5]

- *Disposal of male non-Arab population*: when defences collapse, non-Arab men of fighting age (ages roughly 14-50) are separated from women and children and killed. The pattern was extensively documented in 2003-04 and again at Ardamata in November 2023 and at El Fasher in October 2025.[3][4]

The El Fasher case as proof of concept

El Fasher's eighteen-month siege began in April 2024 when the RSF moved to encircle the city, then under the control of the Sudanese Armed Forces' 6th Infantry Division and a coalition of Darfuri rebel groups including the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM-MM under Minni Minnawi and SLM-AW under Abdul Wahid al-Nur) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM under Jibril Ibrahim).[1][2] El Fasher was, at the siege's start, the only major Darfur city not under RSF control and home to approximately 1.5 million people, swollen from a pre-war population of 540,000 by waves of displaced persons fleeing the RSF advance elsewhere in Darfur.[1][2]

Through 2024 and the first half of 2025, the RSF systematically cut off the city's supply lines, destroyed the Zamzam IDP camp on the southern outskirts, prevented humanitarian convoys from reaching El Fasher (the Saudi Red Crescent and U.N. WFP convoys attempting to deliver were turned back at RSF checkpoints), and conducted artillery and drone strikes on the city itself. Famine was formally declared in El Fasher and Zamzam by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification in August 2024 and reaffirmed in February 2025.[1] By the time the city's defences collapsed, the besieged population had been on subsistence rations for ten months.

The fall followed the documented Janjaweed pattern almost without variation. RSF forces breached the SAF perimeter; the garrison surrendered or was destroyed within days; RSF and allied Arab tribal militias entered the city; non-Arab men were separated from their families and executed in the Zaghawa and Fur quarters; mass rape was widespread. The U.N. human-rights office assessed at least 4,400 people killed within El Fasher in those days and more than 1,600 along the exit routes, totals it describes as almost certainly an undercount.[1][8][3] The surviving population fled toward Tawila and the Chadian border, much of it intercepted at improvised checkpoints where men were killed in roadside summary executions.[8]

The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab's satellite analysis subsequently identified mass-grave sites at locations consistent with the testimony of survivors who reached Tawila and Chad. The U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan, reporting in February 2026, found that the RSF had acted with intent to destroy the Zaghawa and Fur communities in El Fasher, the hallmarks of genocide under the 1948 Convention.[3][9]

What Flint and de Waal predicted

*Darfur: A New History of a Long War*, first published in 2005 and revised in 2008, did not predict the 2023-25 war's eruption; Flint and de Waal could not have foreseen the timing. But it described, in chapters whose operational specificity is haunting in retrospect, the precise method the Janjaweed used in 2003-04 and the conditions under which it would be reused.

Flint and de Waal documented that the Janjaweed pattern was not a series of episodic atrocities but a coherent campaign strategy: identify the demographically vulnerable Darfuri populations (Fur, Masalit, Zaghawa), encircle them, destroy their food security, and use the resulting humanitarian collapse to facilitate population transfer or extermination. They argued that the Sudanese state had developed this strategy across multiple iterations against multiple Darfuri populations, that it would be reused when political conditions permitted, and that the international community's failure to dismantle the underlying militia structure in the wake of the 2005 Darfur Peace Agreement made the recurrence inevitable.[5]

The 2023-25 conflict has vindicated the prediction. The El Geneina killings of April-November 2023 were the El Fasher of 2004; the Ardamata massacre of November 2023 followed the Janjaweed pattern; the siege of El Fasher in 2024-25 reused the Kabkabiya siege-and-starve doctrine of 2004. The U.S. genocide determination of January 2025 and the U.N. finding of February 2026 are the legal expressions of what Flint and de Waal had described as the foreseeable consequence of leaving the Janjaweed structurally intact under a new institutional name.

Why the analytic frame matters

Western policy in 2023-25 has under-weighted the historical continuity. Diplomatic efforts have treated the RSF as a rational counter-party whose conduct could be modified by pressure, sanctions, or negotiation incentives. The Jeddah process, the AU-led mediation, the African Peace Initiative, and the U.S. envoy efforts under Tom Perriello and his successors all proceeded on the premise that the RSF could be brought to a settlement that included its survival as an institution. The record, as Flint and de Waal laid it out and as the El Fasher fall confirms, suggests that the Janjaweed-RSF continuity makes such a settlement impossible without addressing the underlying militia structure. The Janjaweed accepted no settlement in 2005-2006; they re-emerged as the RSF in 2013; they will re-emerge again under a different name if they survive the 2025-26 war intact.[5][10]

The implication is not that diplomatic engagement is futile, but that the prevailing U.S. and EU theory of the case, that this is a war between two parties either of which could be brought to compromise, does not apply to the Janjaweed side. The Janjaweed-RSF has a twenty-five-year pattern of conducting ethnic-cleansing campaigns against non-Arab Darfuri populations whenever the political opportunity permits. Treating that actor as a normal civil-war counter-party has contributed materially to the policy failures of 2023-25. The El Fasher fall and the genocide finding that followed were foreseeable from the 2005 published literature on what the Janjaweed had been.

The buried fact, twenty years on, is that the outside world knew what the Janjaweed-RSF would do, because Flint and de Waal had explained it, and did not act, because acting would have required confronting the militia in 2013-22 when it could still have been dismantled. The El Fasher dead are the price of that non-action.

Open in the interactive site →