A battle rages for a key city in Sudan’s ravaged western region

For more than a year after civil war began in Sudan, el-Fasher held out. City after city in Darfur, a vast western region of which it is the capital, fell to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group fighting to take over all of Sudan. But el-Fasher remained an island of relative stability. Tens of thousands of people fleeing ethnic cleansing and possible genocide elsewhere joined the hundreds of thousands who had settled in the city during the previous Darfur war 20 years ago. While much of Sudan has collapsed into chaos, el-Fasher maintained a fragile peace.