Zamzam camp falls to RSF after days of attacks on displacement camps, tens of thousands flee to Fasher

“They separated the men from the women and children. We were about 26, with 12 men. The men were placed on the back of a single four-wheel-drive vehicle. They were bound and whipped. We were cursed at,” Aisha Abkar Mohamed, a mother of two, recounts the first hours of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) invasion of the Zamzam displacement camp on Sunday. 

After two days of relentless attacks on the camp, south of North Darfur’s capital Fasher, the RSF captured the camp in the early hours of Sunday, led by its Deputy Commander Abdel Rahim Dagalo. The raid pushed the death toll into the hundreds, and continued to drive tens of thousands more of the camp’s once 750,000 inhabitants to flee toward Fasher, according to eyewitnesses and local activists who spoke to Mada Masr. 

According to an aid worker who is informed on the situation in Zamzam, the camp has largely been emptied. They offered a “conservative” estimate that as many as 80,000 people had been displaced, noting that Zamzam’s population had thinned in recent months due to the RSF’s relentless attacks. 

With homes in Fasher — approximately 15 km away from Zamzam — unable to absorb the influx, the displaced resorted to shelters, schools, or sleeping on the ground under trees or in the sun, amid water, food and medicine shortages in the city, Al-Sadig al-Nur, spokesperson of the Sudan Liberation Movement led by Darfur Governor Minni Arko Minnawi, told Mada Masr. 

In a statement released the same day, the RSF said it fully took over the camp and claimed to have deployed units to “secure civilians and humanitarian workers.”

Sunday’s developments are a stunning and perhaps seismic change in the nearly-year-long siege that has seen the RSF besiege the last remaining military outpost in Darfur and relentlessly bomb Zamzam camp, which houses those displaced from other areas of the western area of Sudan. 

While the RSF has been on the backheel in the war that has engulfed Sudan for the last two years, having lost significant territory in the center of the country and its capital, Dagalo has regrouped his forces in recent months in preparation for a major escalation in the attack on Fasher that will give the paramilitary group a stronger foothold to continue the war. 

Following the takeover, Dagalo appeared in two videos from inside the camp. In one, he was seen in a military vehicle, and, in the other, he addressed the people of Zamzam, claiming they had been protected and denying his forces’ responsibility for any of the violations and the mass displacement. 

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But the RSF has done everything but protect civilians. 

Over the course of the three-day assault, culminating in Sunday’s takeover, an estimated 300 people were killed, North Darfur Health Ministry General Director Ibrahim Khater said to Mada Masr. But several of the residents who fled the camp told Mada Masr that the figure might be as high as 500 due to the RSF’s artillery shelling. 

“There was no time to bury the bodies,” said Aisha, whose husband is among those taken by the RSF to an unknown location. “We wrapped some of them in shrouds and left them in front of the houses.” All of the other residents that fled Zamzam and spoke to Mada Masr described the same scene: bodies strewn across the streets. 

Aisha left the camp at 4 am on Sunday, crossing the valley near the camp with her family, “but our bad luck led us to cross paths with RSF fighters,” she said, adding that they stopped them and interrogated them about who was inside the camp and who was carrying weapons. 

Dagalo leading the assault on Zamzam was anticipated. “It was early morning when we heard that Dagalo had arrived with a special unit near the camp, and that Fouti, one of the RSF commanders in North Darfur, would lead the troops,” a volunteer at a charity kitchen in the camp told Mada Masr. “By then, we hadn’t decided whether to leave. But with the first shots fired from RSF vehicles, I grabbed my family and grandfather and quickly left the camp. No water, no medicine,” they said. “Bodies were in the streets when I left.”

When RSF forces stormed the camp on Sunday, they killed civilians who remained, according to a source in the Darfur Regional Government, who added that the paramilitary fighters set fire to homes and shops. A medical source in Fasher said that their fighters also carried out ethnically motivated arrests and sexual assaults, but added that reports are yet to determine the nature of these violations. 

“The fighters told us, with joy, ‘How did you find us?’ — as in, ‘See how we defeated you?’” Abdel Rahman Moussa told Mada Masr, adding that they hurled racial abuses at the camp’s men.  

Zamzam’s health and supply facilities have been under strain by the RSF for days as the paramilitary group has systematically looted food and medical supply warehouses in Zamzam camp, a displaced person who fled to Fasher told Mada Masr.

Nine members of the humanitarian organization Relief International, including a doctor, operating inside the camp were executed during the RSF’s raid on Friday. 

Zamzam’s healthcare system was already facing severe challenges before the attacks of the recent days, Khater told Mada Masr, with continued RSF shelling and a complete lack of the simplest medical supplies such as cotton and gauze. He also pointed to severe fuel shortages, soaring prices for what little is available, and a scarcity of basic food items and life-saving medicines. Most of North Darfur’s hospitals are now out of service, he added. 

Darfur Governor Minni Arko Minnawi stated on Monday that there had been an agreement between the region’s government, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the RSF to allow the passage of a humanitarian convoy on Sunday. Instead, he said, the RSF targeted the camp at the very time the convoy was expected to arrive.

Without food or medical services, most of those that fled the city on Sunday turned to desperate measures. 

“We were without food or water. We had to eat animal feed. We had fled from Fasher to Abu Shouk, and then to Zamzam. And now Zamzam has fallen. The joint force didn’t come to save us,” Moussa said. 

In recent days, it has been popular resistance forces playing a key role in defending against the RSF’s assault. However, in the early hours of Sunday, these forces, who had set up defensive gathering points inside the camp following the onset of Friday’s attack, withdrew from their positions, according to a field source. The source attributed the retreat to a shortage in ammunition and having to tend to the rising number of injured people amid the continuous shelling.

Underscoring the security collapse, Minnawi tried to drum up further manpower on Sunday, calling on the region's youth to take immediate action to lift the siege on Fasher and Umm Keddada. 

RSF shelling on Abu Shouk camp, north of Fasher, also continued for the second consecutive day on Sunday. Around 75 people were killed and 200 injured in the two days of bombing, Seif Eddin Sago, a member of the camp’s high administrative committee, told Mada Masr.

On Sunday, heavy RSF shelling on the camp killed five people and critically injured seven others, the Fasher Coordination of Resistance Committees spokesperson Adam Regal told Mada Masr. Later on the same day, during Maghreb prayers, the RSF resumed its shelling, “turning the camp into a scene of tragedy,” with several community leaders and displaced people living in the camp killed in the attack, Regal said. With the healthcare system in total collapse and medical services unavailable, there was no means to treat the wounded, he added. 

Sago stressed that Abu Shouk is in urgent need of humanitarian and medical intervention to save the remaining civilians trapped amid the attacks. Health facilities and the camp’s two main water sources were bombed and destroyed, leaving residents with no access to clean water, he added. 

Sago appealed to international and regional humanitarian organizations, as well as the United Nations Security Council, urging immediate intervention to deliver aid and open safe corridors for unarmed civilians and displaced people “who are dying from hunger, shelling and thirst” in Abu Shouk.

According to Nur, the RSF attacks on both camps and Fasher over the past days killed around 450 people so far, with thousands more injured.

He accused the RSF of continuing what he described as a “campaign of ethnic cleansing,” similar to the genocide committed in Geneina, West Darfur, in 2023. 

Nur called on all parties to take action, warning that “the fall of Fasher would mean the fall of every other city in Sudan, one after the other.” While acknowledging the role of the military-allied joint force in liberating several states, Nur called for urgent coordination with military forces to intervene in Darfur.

Meanwhile, airdrops of humanitarian aid to Fasher have come to a halt. Displaced people said they heard that the airdrops will not resume, after days of absence, according to Nur. With Fasher increasingly under strain, Air Force military operations have also ceased, which Nur said raises questions about the fate of a large military force, announced by the military as mobilized in Dabba, Northern State, over two months ago to join the battle for Fasher, asking why it hadn’t arrived yet.

He further urged military leadership to act swiftly to save the lives of around 1.5 million people currently trapped in Fasher, calling for immediate support for the military, the joint force and allied fighters to avert a catastrophe on the scale of Geneina.

The RSF killed as many as 1,500 people in the Darfur city of Geneina in ethnically motivated violence in November 2023.  

Regal, for his part, held the RSF fully responsible for the repeated targeting of unarmed civilians and called for an immediate end to the attacks. He also blamed the military and the joint force for putting displaced civilians at risk by using the camps as human shields and urged them to refrain from operating or stationing near displacement camps.