On October 25, 2025, El Fasher, the capital of Sudan’s North Darfur, became the site of one of the most intense episodes of mass killing since the Rwandan genocide. A genocidal militia blocked off neighborhoods and went house to house executing people. The United Nations Human Rights Office documented at least 6,000 killings in the first three days, with countless others still missing, uncounted, or hiding in this murdered city.

The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) had already committed countless atrocities, including the slaughter of ten to fifteen thousand people in the city of El Geneina in 2023. A world swept up by the Save Darfur movement in the 2000s sat on its hands for two years as the same killers besieged the communities that escaped them twenty years earlier.

How could one of the grisliest episodes of the Darfur genocide pass through headlines with limited outcry, let alone action? Many things had changed since Save Darfur: the West soured on humanitarian intervention, the UN faced a dire liquidity crisis, and journalists and celebrities stopped diving headfirst into “African conflicts.” Yet perhaps most tangibly, the génocidaires had an unusually audacious patron: the United Arab Emirates (UAE).