Nathaniel Raymond, Executive Director at Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) at Yale School of Public Health @nattyray11 :
“For what happens in al-Fashr. And so I’m going to say some things that I’ve never said publicly before here in a second. We got ground photos from al-Janina pretty early on in the killing that we had not made public. And that became very important, because we were using them to measure the bodies, because there were so many body piles of Masalit men and boys. They basically caught this one neighborhood and blocked it off. And they raped the women and the girls, but the women and the girls would gather the bodies and put them in basically a mausoleum they created out of a schoolhouse. And so we could navigate and follow the RSF killing from space using the body piles as navigation points. They were killing so many. And so we got very good measurement that the average dead Masalit boy was 1.3 meters and dead Masalit man was 2 meters in 30-centimeter, very high-resolution satellite imagery. And so we then detect, through NASA sensors, thermal plumes exploding to the north and a little bit to the south, but mostly the north-northwest. The village of Serba goes up. We watch that from space as they attack like hyenas. They come in on one side to lead the people in one direction. Then they attack from the other direction very closely. And so what I’m saying is we assessed at that point for the US government that the RSF was using the fighting in the capital to finish the Darfur genocide beginning with the Masalit. And we sent a very important secret warning saying that al-Fasher would likely be under attack by the end of the 2023-2024 dry season. So an important thing here. Any Sudanese people in the house? Yeah. So you guys know that the fighting in Sudan is seasonal. And the weather patterns are essential to assessing and predicting what people are going to do. And so we sent a message to the US government up to National Security Council, National Intelligence Council, that al-Fasher was going to be under attack probably earliest November ‘23 into the beginning of ‘24. And we briefed the UN Security Council in private session in July 2023. So we were two and a half years from the massacre in al-Fasher that would happen on October 26 until now. And so we had two and a half years of warning. And we could see from how they were moving the forces out of Jenana. They were attacking the critical SAF garrisons, but also the communities around Zalengi, Nyala, Kass, Ardmada, the Bulbul massacre. And so they were basically creating this net that the focus was al-Fasher. And the reason why al-Fasher was so important to go back to the first genocide is that the Zagawa and the four, really because of, in a way, success of UN peacekeeping, had run to al-Fasher as the safe haven. And around al-Fasher, you have al-Salam, Abu Shuk, and most importantly, Zamzam camp, 12 kilometers to the south. So on one hand, they go into the safe haven, and they become sitting ducks. And so we could see, by the time we get to the spring of 2024, so we sat the siege watching from space for 18 months. The siege lasted 18 months. I want to put this in perspective. Al-Fasher was under siege for three and a half times Stalingrad, and three quarters the siege of Leningrad during World War II. Gaza was under IPC-5 for, I think, a month to two months. Correct me if I’m wrong. We were under IPC-5 and al-Fasher, integrated phase classification level five, highest level of famine, for 15 months, OK, 15 months. And now that the massacre has happened and the city has fallen to the RSF, the aid workers that we talk to, and this is a good lead-in to my friend, that those who have arrived in Tawila, which Nick mentioned, which is the last safe haven out of al-Fasher, those very few that have arrived have one of the highest rates of malnutrition we have ever recorded in my knowledge as a humanitarian. And who arrived out of the massacre?
It was women and unaccompanied minor children. Why? Because they were killing the men and boys at a berm. They built a wall around al-Fasher by the fall of this past year that we were the first to catch it. It was nine feet high, and they had bulldozers working around the clock in backhoes, 37 kilometers long. They created a kill box. And they walled in the remaining four in the Zagawa in the city. And basically, the last major battle to date of the Darfur genocide. And when it fell, we could see the street filled overnight with 1.3 meter to 2 meter objects. And they were in C shape, J shape, or L shape. That’s because when you shoot someone and you look at them from space when they get shot, they’ll fall in the field position or on their knees. And so we saw trucks with 50 cal machine guns, and we would see half meter red discoloration on the ground. And that was blood. And we think we got to call. This is where I’ll end. We had a ground network. We think they’re all dead now. Our ground guys call us on Monday after the fall. And in the morning, they say 1,200 of our family members and friends are dead. By that evening, they say 10,000. By Tuesday, we never got them on the phone again.”