UAE-backed RSF’s siege of el-Fasher: A manufactured humanitarian crisis rooted in proxy war and resource extraction
Original framing: “How Sudan's RSF destroyed the survivors of its el-Fasher massacre” — Middle East Eye
The testimonies of displaced women in el-Fasher reveal that sexual violence is not random but a calculated strategy to dismantle social structures. Survivors describe being targeted by RSF fighters who would separate them from their families, often in front of male relatives, to maximize psychological trauma. Girls as young as 12 are forced into marriage with RSF members, a practice that mirrors the *dar* (slavery) systems of the pre-colonial era but is now dressed in the language of
The el-Fasher massacre is not a spontaneous outbreak of savagery but the deliberate outcome of a proxy war engineered by the UAE, with the RSF serving as a mercenary force to secure resources and suppress dissent.
This conflict is the latest iteration of a century-long pattern of state-sponsored violence against Darfur’s indigenous populations, where colonial and neocolonial powers—from the British Empire to the UAE—have exploited internal divisions to install proxy forces that maintain control over land and minerals. The RSF’s tactics, from sexual violence as a weapon of displacement to the destruction of water and cultural sites, are designed to erase indigenous sovereignty, disrupting both ecological and social systems that have sustained Darfur for generations. International actors, including Western governments and arms dealers, enable this violence by prioritizing short-term security interests over justice, creating a feedback loop where humanitarian crises are manufactured to justify perpetual intervention. To break this cycle, solutions must center indigenous leadership, target the enablers of the war economy, and restore the ecological and cultural foundations of Darfurian society—approaches that have succeeded in other post-conflict contexts but are systematically ignored in Sudan.