World
A Massacre Threatens Darfur — Again
This is one of the biggest cities in Darfur, a region once synonymous with genocide. Now, it is on the brink of another catastrophe.
A video shows a neighborhood on fire.
Using the same scorched-earth tactics that horrified the world two decades ago, fighters have torched thousands of homes and forced tens of thousands to flee.
Satellite imagery shows several active fires burning in different structures in a neighborhood.
A civil war is ripping apart Sudan, one of Africa’s largest countries.
Tens of thousands have been killed, millions scattered and an enormous famine looms, setting off one of the world’s biggest humanitarian crises.
The city of El Fasher, home to 1.8 million people, is now at the center of global alarm. If it falls, officials warn, there may be little to stop a massacre.
Fighters battling Sudan’s military for control of the country have encircled the city. Gunfights rage. Hospitals have closed. Residents are running out of food.
The advancing fighters are known as the Rapid Support Forces — the successors to the notorious Janjaweed militias that slaughtered ethnic African tribes in Darfur in the 2000s. Last week, the U.N. Security Council demanded that they “halt the siege” of the city.
Yet a New York Times examination of satellite imagery and video from El Fasher make one thing clear:
The assault is intensifying.
Fighters battling the military often film themselves celebrating as neighborhoods burn on their push to the city center.
Videos show R.S.F. fighters in vehicles on a main road in El Fasher and celebrating as a neighborhood burns.
As the fighters closed in, more than 40 villages were burned near El Fasher since the beginning of April. Sources: Yale Humanitarian Research Lab (communities); Thomas van Linge (R.S.F. control)
A map shows the 43 villages that were damaged or destroyed.
More than 20,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed since the military’s rivals — the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F. — seized the east of the city. Sources: Yale Humanitarian Research Lab (burned area); UNOSAT (buildings)
A map shows the large burned areas in eastern and southern El Fasher.
With both sides imposing restrictions on aid, only a trickle of humanitarian relief — around 22 trucks for a city of 1.8 million — has reached El Fasher in the past three months.
A map shows where aid used to come into the city before the fighting. Even before this battle, about 500,000 people had been living in displacement camps in and around the city, some for decades. Now famine threatens and the two camps in the north are engulfed by fighting.
A map shows the three largest displaced camps in El Fasher. Zamzam, the most populous, is south of the city.
At the Zamzam camp south of the city, one child dies from hunger every two hours, Doctors Without Borders said in February. A woman and her baby in Zamzam camp wait alongside other women and their babies in a photo from January 2024.
Some were deliberately razed. Others may have caught fire in clashes with government forces.
The Times analyzed videos and satellite images of El Fasher, along with imagery analysis from the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab and the Sudan Witness Project at the Centre for Information Resilience, a nonprofit organization that documents potential war crimes.
The evidence shows that thousands of homes have been systematically razed and that tens of thousands of people have been forced to flee. Videos show the demeaning treatment of captives and the presence of a senior Rapid Support Forces commander recently singled out by U.S. sanctions for his role in atrocities against civilians.
On June 8, a major hospital run by Doctors Without Borders was forced to shut down after the military’s rivals stormed the compound, firing their weapons and looting equipment, including an ambulance.
Videos show R.S.F. fighters storming a major hospital and stealing an ambulance.
Videos posted in recent weeks show the military’s rivals rounding up and interrogating people. Some were whipped and forced to make animal noises.
A video shows the R.S.F. rounding up men, and another clip shows them making kneeling men make animal noises.
Other videos showed heavy clashes in the streets, as well as the bodies of fighters apparently killed in combat.
Videos show R.S.F. troops fighting in the streets, as well as a body in the street. As the violence spreads, aid workers say civilians are fleeing west and to other parts of Darfur. Those going east have walked up to 180 miles in search of safety, often in temperatures reaching more than 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
A map shows the route that many displaced people are taking away from El Fasher to the east and southeast, the direction from El Fasher not currently held by the R.S.F.
A growing number of women say they were sexually assaulted on the journey. A photo shows people evacuating El Fasher.
As the International Criminal Court appeals for evidence of atrocities, the fighters are making little effort to hide their actions. In this video, a Rapid Support Forces patch is clearly visible.
An R.S.F. patch is clearly visible in a video.
Watching the arrivals is “truly heart-wrenching,” said a doctor with the aid group Care in East Darfur.
The Sudanese military, too, has faced accusations of war crimes, mostly for the indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas with artillery and airstrikes. On May 11, Doctors Without Borders said, the military bombed an area next to a children’s hospital.
‘Precipice’ of a massacre
The siege of El Fasher has disturbing echoes of Rapid Support Forces tactics elsewhere in Darfur, where assaults were accompanied by ethnic slaughter, experts say.
Last fall, when the fighters captured El Geneina, near Sudan’s border with Chad, as many as 15,000 people were killed in a matter of days, U.N. investigators found.
Now El Fasher residents fear a repeat.
Note: 2024 imagery includes some imagery from the next month, in April. Source: Satellite imagery from Airbus via Google Earth
Longstanding ethnic tensions have underpinned the violence in Darfur for decades. Just as the Arab-dominated Janjaweed carried out a genocidal campaign against ethnic Africans in the 2000s, the Rapid Support Forces are targeting them now, with international warnings that a genocide could happen again.
In April, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the American ambassador to the U.N., warned that El Fasher was “on the precipice of a large-scale massacre.”
Aid supplies choked
El Fasher is not just a city under siege. It is also a hub for relief aid in a region hurtling toward famine.
Already 1.7 million people are starving in Darfur, the U.N. says. Now, the consequences of the war are rippling across the region, which is the size of Spain.
Food and medicine are running short in East Darfur, where tens of thousands fled the fighting, because the supply route through El Fasher has been cut off, aid workers say. And in Central Darfur, some food prices doubled after commercial traders could no longer operate, according to Islamic Relief, an aid group working there.
The crisis is compounded by a severe lack of funds. The United Nations issued an emergency appeal for $2.7 billion. It has received less than a fifth of that.
American officials accuse both sides in the civil war of using hunger as a weapon.
Commanders Accused of Crimes
Several R.S.F. commanders who led campaigns elsewhere in Sudan joined the fight for El Fasher, according to videos verified by The Times and the Sudan Witness Project. They include Ali Yagoub Gibril, the R.S.F. commander for Central Darfur state, who was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in May for his role in violence that caused civilian casualties. He was killed on June 14, according to Sudan’s military.
Ali Yagoub Gibril (left) and Al Zeer Salem (right), another prominent R.S.F. commander, in two videos from El Fasher posted to social media.
Broadcasting the presence of prominent leaders signifies the importance of El Fasher to the R.S.F. But it could also demonstrate their responsibility for atrocities, said Matthew Gillett, a senior lecturer at the University of Essex who previously worked at international criminal courts.
Videos showing R.S.F. leaders in close proximity to attacks on civilians “could help show the commanders’ awareness and command and control at the time,” Mr. Gillett said, even if the attacks were committed by their subordinates.
“The videos from El Fasher could become critical evidence in future trials for crimes in Darfur.”
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By Jorge Mitssunaga
January 31, 2026
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A top Kremlin official praised President Donald Trump as an effective leader seeking peace in Ukraine, saying Moscow views renewed talks with Washington as productive.
Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council and a former president, said Trump is genuinely trying to end the war in Ukraine and wants to be remembered as a peacemaker.
“Trump wants to go down in history as a peacemaker — and he is really trying,” Medvedev said in an interview with Reuters. “And that is why contacts with Americans have become much more productive.”
Trump has repeatedly said a peace deal to end the war is close. U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff said during a Cabinet meeting Thursday that he had “productive and constructive meetings” with Russian special envoy Kirill Dmitriev as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to end the Russia-Ukraine war.
WITKOFF SAYS TALKS WITH RUSSIAN ENVOY WERE ‘PRODUCTIVE AND CONSTRUCTIVE’ AMID TRUMP ADMIN’S PEACE PUSH
Dmitry Medvedev attends an interview with Reuters, TASS and WarGonzo in the Moscow region, Russia, on Jan. 29, 2026. (Dmitry Medvedev’s Secretariat/Handout via Reuters)
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced Sunday that a new round of talks involving Ukraine, the United States and Russia will take place this week in Abu Dhabi. His announcement comes as Russia has intensified attacks on Ukraine’s energy and logistics infrastructure, worsening conditions for civilians as winter temperatures plunge.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaks during a press conference in Kyiv on Feb. 10, 2025. (Tetiana Dzhafarova/AFP via Getty Images)
Medvedev dismissed speculation that Trump is secretly aligned with Moscow, telling the outlet that Americans elected him and Russia respects that choice. He also praised Trump for standing up to the U.S. political establishment and said his blunt, sometimes “brash” style is misunderstood.
ZELENSKYY ANNOUNCES NEXT ROUND OF TALKS WITH US, RUSSIA AS UKRAINE AIMS FOR ‘REAL AND DIGNIFIED END TO THE WAR’
“He is an emotional person, but on the other hand, the chaos that is commonly referred to, which is created by his activities, is not entirely true,” Medvedev said. “It is obvious that behind this lies a completely conscious and competent line.”
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and President Donald Trump meet at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 22, 2026. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Handout via Reuters)
Medvedev told the outlet that Trump’s background as a businessman shapes his approach, joking that there is no such thing as a former businessman, an echo of a well-known Russian saying about former KGB agents.
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Medvedev, a hardliner within Russia’s leadership, has frequently warned of nuclear escalation since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. He has stressed that avoiding further conflict remains the priority, but still expects Russia to achieve military victory in Ukraine.
“I would like this to happen as soon as possible,” Medvedev said of ending the conflict. “But it is equally important to think about what will happen next. The goal of victory is to prevent new conflicts.”
Published on •Updated
Some good news for air travellers. Many European airports are finally ditching the controversial 100 millilitre limit on cabin bag liquids, marking the end of an era of minuscule, overpriced creams and shampoos.
It follows the rollout of new CT security scanners, which provide high-resolution 3D visuals detecting both solid and liquid explosives. Last July, the EU Commission said that a move to scrap the rule across the whole bloc is also in the pipeline.
The 100ml limit was introduced in Europe and beyond in 2006, after UK police had foiled an Islamist plot to blow up transatlantic flights using liquid bombs hidden inside soft drink bottles.
Which airports let you fly with liquids of up to 2L?
With the new rules, people would be able to carry up to 2 litres per single container in their cabin bag.
But travellers should carefully read the cabin bag rules before packing. Many EU and European airports (actually, most of them) haven’t complied yet.
United Kingdom: Widespread CT scanner use
London Heathrow, the continent’s busiest airport, was the latest to raise the liquid limit, only a few weeks ago, enforcing it across all its terminals. It followed other British hubs like London Gatwick, Birmingham, Belfast and Edinburgh.
London Stansted isn’t there yet, but passengers can leave their liquids inside their bags without placing them in an external plastic container. The same applies to London City Airport and Luton.
Germany: Patchy adoption in Frankfurt, Berlin and Munich
Munich airport authorities told Europe in Motion that the limit has been increased to 2L “at 15 security lanes in Terminal 2 and five lanes in Terminal 1”.
The remaining lanes “do not yet have modern CT technology”, so “the 100ml limit continues to apply”, they said.
Similarly, at Frankfurt Airport, only “some security checkpoints are already using new CT scanners that allow up to 2 litres”.
The same applies to Berlin Brandenburg, where 2L is allowed only in 24 security lanes.
“In 2026, we will begin the refurbishment of the remaining security lanes in the main hall of Terminal 1,” Berlin airport authorities told us, while they continue to recommend passengers to stick to 100ml “to ensure a smooth process”.
Italy: Ongoing rollout in north and centre
Good news for tourists visiting Italy soon for the Winter Olympics, as travelling with liquids of up to 2L is now allowed atMilan Linate,Bologna, Rome Fiumicino, Milan Malpensa (Terminal 1 only), and Turin (for fast-track passengers only).
Other European airports that have increased the liquid limit
Passengers can carry liquids of a maximum of 2L also going through Dublin, Prague Vaclav Terminal 2, Vilniusand Kaunas (Lithuania),Kraków and Poznań (Poland), Cluj (Romania), Denmark’s Billund and Malta.
Which other airports plan to raise the limit and which don’t?
Amsterdam Schiphol, Europe’s third busiest airport, and Barcelona El Prat told Europe in Motion that they are following European regulations, but didn’t elaborate on whether they would raise the limit to 2L in the future.
Brussels Zaventem also doesn’t envisage changes: “We are monitoring technological developments, but at the moment there are no concrete plans to adapt the security equipment,” they told us.
Likewise, at airports in Paris, Marseille, Madrid, Athens and Lisbon, the limit for liquid containers stays 100ml.
Athens plans to introduce the new 2L scanners in early 2027, once expansion works at Eleftherios Venizelos are completed, authorities told us, while Paris airports aim to be fully ready by 2030.
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