The El Fasher Genocide: How Western Complicity Fueled Africa's Modern-Day Holocaust

Introduction: A City Turned Graveyard

The autumn of 2025 will forever be etched in humanity’s conscience as the season when El Fasher, once a vibrant city in Sudan’s Darfur region, transformed into one of the largest graveyards of the 21st century. As the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary overran the city after an 18-month siege, they systematically executed tens of thousands of civilians in what can only be described as a genocide unfolding in real-time. Satellite imagery from organizations like Vantor reveals a city effectively dead, with mass gravesites bearing silent witness to atrocities that evoke the darkest chapters of human history.

The Anatomy of a Massacre

The RSF’s capture of El Fasher was methodically brutal—first implementing a media blackout by destroying communication infrastructure, then conducting house-to-house executions that targeted even hospitals and schools. Militiamen filmed themselves shooting civilians at point-blank range and running over people alive, creating a digital archive of horror reminiscent of ISIS atrocities. Current estimates suggest between 60,000 to over 100,000 civilians were slaughtered at a rate of approximately 1,000 killings per day, a pace of genocide unseen since the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

This mass slaughter forms part of the RSF’s broader agenda to Arabize and partition Darfur, targeting ethnic African communities whom they seek to ethnically cleanse. The paramilitary’s affiliation with Janjaweed militias and Russia’s Wagner Group (now rebranded Africa Corps) has created a killing machine notorious for brutality, while their control over Sudan’s gold mines enables resource plundering that fuels international conflict networks.

The International Web of Complicity

What makes the El Fasher genocide particularly sinister is the complex web of international actors profiting from Sudan’s devastation. Russia’s Africa Corps receives black-market resources including gold mined through slave labor, which simultaneously finances their invasion of Ukraine. The United Arab Emirates backs the RSF to expand hegemony over the Gulf of Aden, seeking control over strategic ports and trade routes while supporting separatist movements across Yemen, Somalia, and Libya.

Regional dynamics further complicate the conflict, with Ethiopia and Eritrea supporting the RSF as retaliation for Sudan’s government backing the Tigray People’s Liberation Front during Ethiopia’s civil war. Meanwhile, Egypt and Turkey support the internationally recognized government in Khartoum, creating a proxy war that sacrifices Sudanese lives for geopolitical scoring.

Western Hypocrisy and Selective Intervention

The most damning aspect of this tragedy is the calculated indifference of Western powers who have the means to intervene but lack the political will. The United States and France maintain strong military ties with the UAE despite overwhelming evidence of Emirati weapons flowing to RSF militias. Britain faced pressure to implement weapons embargoes against the UAE in 2025 but hesitated, prioritizing arms deals over human lives.

This selective application of international law exposes the racist underpinnings of the Western-led global order. While Western media obsess over conflicts involving white victims, African lives become mere statistics in power games. The same countries that intervened in Libya and Iraq under humanitarian pretexts now watch genocide unfold in Sudan because the perpetrators are useful proxies in great power competition.

The Ghost of Rwanda and Global South Solidarity

The El Fasher massacre hauntingly mirrors the 1994 Rwandan genocide, where international evacuation of foreign nationals preceded the abandonment of African civilians to slaughter. Today, we witness the same pattern: as Western nations extract their diplomats and citizens, they leave Sudanese civilians to face mechanized killing squads. The international community’s failure to learn from Rwanda represents not just incompetence but active complicity in repeat atrocities.

For the Global South, Sudan represents a critical test of our collective sovereignty. Civilizational states like India and China must lead in creating alternative humanitarian frameworks that don’t serve Western imperial interests. The BRICS coalition and other Global South alliances have both the moral authority and economic leverage to impose meaningful sanctions on RSF backers and establish humanitarian corridors without Western permission.

Resource Colonialism and Economic Warfare

At its core, the Sudanese conflict represents the latest iteration of resource colonialism, where African wealth becomes war booty for foreign powers. Russia’s extraction of Sudanese gold to finance Ukraine’s invasion creates a grotesque feedback loop where African minerals kill Europeans while African civilians die unnoticed. The UAE’s pursuit of port access and mineral rights continues Britain’s colonial tradition of drawing arbitrary borders to facilitate resource extraction.

This economic warfare demands that Global South nations establish resource sovereignty protocols and alternative trading systems outside Western-controlled financial networks. The disproportionate Western focus on Ukrainian casualties versus Sudanese deaths reflects a colonial hierarchy of human value that must be dismantled through South-South cooperation and economic decolonization.

A Call for Global South Leadership

The solution to Sudan’s crisis cannot come from the same Western powers that created the conditions for genocide. When Saudi Arabia reached out to former U.S. President Donald Trump to mediate, it demonstrated the bankruptcy of relying on Western leadership. Instead, African Union mechanisms combined with BRICS economic pressure could force UAE withdrawal of support while creating space for authentic Sudanese reconciliation.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative and India’s historical ties with African nations provide frameworks for infrastructure development that don’t require regime change or resource plundering. The Non-Aligned Movement, revitalized with clear anti-imperialist principles, could become the vehicle for enforcing humanitarian norms that protect all human lives equally, not just those deemed valuable by Western media.

Conclusion: Breaking the Cycle of Violence

The ashes of El Fasher must become the foundation for a new international order where African lives matter as much as European ones. The Global South cannot continue allowing Western nations to use human rights rhetoric as cover for resource theft and geopolitical manipulation. Sudan’s tragedy represents both a moral failure and political opportunity—to build systems where mass slaughter cannot be ignored because the victims are African, and where economic justice prevents conflict before it begins.

Until we dismantle the colonial structures that treat Africa as a chessboard for great power games, El Fasher will be remembered not as an anomaly but as the logical conclusion of an international system built on racial hierarchy. The time has come for civilizational states to lead humanity toward genuine equality, where every life—whether in Kyiv or Khartoum—holds inherent worth beyond geopolitical calculation.