World

A Massacre Threatens Darfur — Again

Published

2 years ago

June 19, 2024

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.
Some were deliberately razed. Others may have caught fire in clashes with government forces.

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.

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.
Watching the arrivals is “truly heart-wrenching,” said a doctor with the aid group Care in East Darfur.

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.

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.”

World

Supreme Court rejects Virginia’s bid to restore congressional map favoring Democrats

Published

7 minutes ago

May 16, 2026

Press Room

Supreme Court rejects Virginia’s bid to restore congressional map favoring Democrats

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Friday rejected Virginia’s bid to restore a congressional map that would have given Democrats a chance to pick up four seats in the closely divided House of Representatives.

The court’s order, issued without any noted dissent, is the latest twist in the nation’s mid-decade redistricting competition. It was kicked off last year by President Donald Trump urging Republican-controlled states to redraw their lines and was supercharged by a recent Supreme Court ruling severely weakening the Voting Rights Act that opened up even more winnable seats for the GOP.

In recent days, the justices have sided with Republicans in Alabama and Louisiana who hope to redo their congressional maps to produce more GOP-leaning seats following the court’s voting rights decision.

But the Virginia situation was different, stemming from a 4-3 ruling by the Virginia Supreme Court that struck down a constitutional amendment that voters narrowly passed just last month.

The state court found that the Democratic-controlled legislature improperly began the process of placing the amendment on the ballot after early voting had begun in Virginia’s general election last fall.

The Supreme Court typically doesn’t intervene in state court proceedings unless they present an issue of federal law. Virginia Democrats had hoped to persuade the justices that the Virginia court misread federal law and Supreme Court precedent that hold that, even if early voting is underway, an election does not happen until Election Day itself.

Virginia’s amendment had been intended as a response to Republican gains in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio, and to blunt a new map in Florida that just became law. Once the Virginia amendment passed, it briefly turned the nationwide redistricting scramble into a draw between the two parties.

That was unraveled by the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision.

The state’s attorney general, Democrat Jay Jones, slammed the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, saying it was another example of what he described as a national attack on voting rights and the rule of law.

“Let’s be clear about what is happening. Donald Trump, Republican state legislatures, and conservative courts are systematically and unabashedly tilting power away from the people for Trump’s political gain,” Jones said in a statement issued late Friday night.

The state’s top Democrats had disagreed about whether it was even too late for help from the Supreme Court. “Time grows short, but it is not yet too late,” lawyers for the Democratic leaders of the legislature as well as the state told the justices in a brief filed Friday.

A day earlier, the office of Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger already had confirmed that the state will hold this year’s elections under the current districts established in 2021. Last month, Virginia Commissioner of Elections Steve Koski said a court order was needed by this past Tuesday to set the district lines for primary elections on Aug. 4.

Spanberger reacted to Friday’s decision by saying both courts had nullified the votes of the more than 3 million Virginians who cast ballots in the April 21 special election.

“These Virginians made their voices heard — casting their ballots in good faith to push back against a President who said he’s ‘entitled’ to more seats in Congress before voters go to the polls,” she posted on her X account.

The leader of the state Republican Party said the justices made the right call.

“Wisely, the Supreme Court of the United States has confirmed the judgment of the Supreme Court of Virginia,” state party chairman Jeff Ryer said. “This should once and for all put to rest the Democrats’ effort to disenfranchise half of Virginia.

___

Associated Press writer Safiyah Riddle in Montgomery, Alabama, contributed to this report.

World

Trump says Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, second in command of ISIS globally, killed in US-Nigerian operation

Published

1 hour ago

May 16, 2026

Press Room

Trump says Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, second in command of ISIS globally, killed in US-Nigerian operation

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President Donald Trump announced late Friday that U.S. and Nigerian forces carried out an operation that killed a global ISIS leader.

Trump identified the terrorist as Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, whom he described as ISIS’s second-in-command globally.

“Tonight, at my direction, brave American forces and the Armed Forces of Nigeria flawlessly executed a meticulously planned and very complex mission to eliminate the most active terrorist in the world from the battlefield,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

“Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, second in command of ISIS globally, thought he could hide in Africa, but little did he know we had sources who kept us informed on what he was doing,” Trump continued. “He will no longer terrorize the people of Africa, or help plan operations to target Americans.”

100 US TROOPS LAND IN NIGERIA AS ISLAMIC MILITANTS THREATEN WEST AFRICA REGIONAL SECURITY

President Donald Trump sits at a table monitoring military operations during Operation Epic Fury against Iran at the White House in Washington, D.C., on March 2. (The White House via X Account/Anadolu/Getty Images)

Trump also thanked the Nigerian government for its cooperation in the mission.

“With his removal, ISIS’s global operation is greatly diminished,” he added.

Additional details surrounding the mission were not immediately available.

Fox News Digital has reached out to the White House for comment.

US MILITARY IN SYRIA CARRIES OUT 10 STRIKES ON MORE THAN 30 ISIS TARGETS: PHOTOS

The announcement comes after U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said it carried out multiple strikes against more than 30 ISIS targets in Syria in February as part of a joint military effort to “sustain relentless military pressure on remnants from the terrorist network.”

CENTCOM said U.S. forces struck ISIS infrastructure and weapons-storage targets using fixed-wing, rotary-wing and unmanned aircraft.

DEADLY STRIKE ON US TROOPS TESTS TRUMP’S COUNTER-ISIS PLAN — AND HIS TRUST IN SYRIA’S NEW LEADER

The U.S. military carried out ten strikes against more than 30 ISIS targets in Syria following a December ambush that killed U.S. troops. (CENTCOM)

Trump told reporters on Jan. 27 that he had a “great conversation” with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa.

“All of the things having to do with Syria in that area are working out very, very well,” he said at the time. “So, we are very happy about it.”

CENTCOM announced in February that more than 50 ISIS terrorists had been killed or captured and more than 100 ISIS infrastructure targets struck during two months of targeted operations in Syria.

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The U.S. launched Operation Hawkeye Strike in response to an ISIS ambush that killed two U.S. service members and an American interpreter Dec. 13, 2025, in Palmyra, Syria.

Fox News Digital’s Ashley J. DiMella contributed to this report.