July 08, 2026
We continue our conversation with
documentary filmmaker Julia Steers about her reporting on
the conflict in Sudan, where the military and the
paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have been locked in a
battle for control since 2023. While both sides are accused
of war crimes, the RSF drew global condemnation after its
fighters carried out atrocities in the city of El Fasher in
October of 2025, with the United Nations describing them as
“acts of genocide.” Advocates now fear further mass
killings in the besieged city of El Obeid.
Steers
contributed to a recent investigation titled “Inside
the Secret Network Fueling Sudan’s
War.”
Transcript
This is a rush
transcript. Copy may not be in its final
form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is
Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and
Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
In Part
1 of our discussion with the filmmaker Julia Steers, we
talked about her film Inside the Secret Network Fueling
Sudan’s War. We talked about the role particularly of
the United Arab Emirates in Sudan’s civil war and the
human toll.
In Part 2 of our discussion, we’re going
to continue talking about Sudan, but an earlier documentary
that Julia Steers made, and it was for the Al Jazeera
Fault Lines series, called No Exit from El
Fasher. This is a clip.
Advertisement – scroll to continue reading
RUQAYA
JABER: [translated] Sometimes I can’t sleep
because of the things I remember. I remember the dead people
on the road, young people’s bodies lying side by
side.
JULIA STEERS: In October 2025,
the city of El Fasher in Sudan became a killing ground.
Thousands of civilians trying to flee the city were hunted
down and executed. According to the U.N., at least 6,000
people were killed in three days. It was a ruthless campaign
to capture the city by a paramilitary group called the Rapid
Support Forces, or RSF, and it came after a brutal 18-month
siege of El Fasher that trapped civilians
inside.
RUQAYA JABER: [translated]
There was no exit from El Fasher. There was no exit until
the city fell. If you’re inside, you stay in. And if
you’re out, you stay out. There was no
exit.
AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt from
No Exit from El Fasher from Al Jazeera’s Fault
Lines. We are joined by Julia Steers.
Thank you
for continuing us, Julia — with us, on this first
documentary you did. Describe what happened in El
Fasher.
JULIA STEERS: El Fasher is
the capital of North Darfur. Darfur is a critical region in
Sudan, and it was under siege for 18 months by both sides,
the Sudan Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces. And
towards the end of a really brutal 18-month siege, where
civilians were bombarded from the air and attacked within
the city, the Rapid Support Forces encircled the city. They
dug a berm around the entire city, preventing food and
humanitarian supplies from getting in. And then, during
three really brutal days in late October of last year, they
took the city.
The Sudanese Armed Forces retreated.
But in the process, the Rapid Support Forces launched a
brutal attack on civilians who were trying to flee the city.
You know, at the time, people were saying the death toll was
close to 10,000, but the reality is, despite really
harrowing and gruesome tales coming out of El Fasher,
including in our documentary, you know, the true toll of
what really happened in El Fasher is unknown to this
day.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s go to
another clip from No Exit from El Fasher, which
begins with Amnesty International’s Crisis Response
Program researcher, Janine Morna.
JANINE
MORNA: Nobody was really spared from the violence.
And I think there’s a real dehumanizing of this population
over time, over the period of the siege, that allowed for
these atrocities to happen. It seems, somehow, that El
Fasher was a prize that they were willing to take at any
cost.
There was a time before the takeover of El
Fasher where so much could have been done to save lives,
where people were trying whatever they could do to ring the
alarm bells and say, “We are on the precipice of something
really major.” And nobody seemed to hear those cries or to
take them seriously. As an international community, we
couldn’t even provide people the most basic of protection
during this period of time.
JULIA
STEERS: U.N. investigators say the RSF strategy in
El Fasher bears the hallmarks of a genocide, with the RSF
specifically targeting non-Arab communities. Entire families
have been wiped out.
AMY GOODMAN:
Tell us more, as you continue with this, and also about the
role of other countries and how this could have been
prevented, Julia.
JULIA STEERS: So,
as Janine is saying in the documentary, you know, one of the
sort of most unbelievable things about the fall of El Fasher
is that we knew that it was going to happen. So,
humanitarian organizations were sounding the alarm about
this, you know, for many months prior to the city actually
falling. There were a few sort of paltry efforts to
establish a humanitarian corridor to get aid to civilians or
to help civilians get out, but, really, there was just, you
know, a lot of sort of diplomatic hand-wringing and
acceptance that civilians were going to be trapped inside as
the RSF launched this absolutely brutal attack. We could
monitor from satellite imagery that they were encircling the
city, that they were digging a berm around the city. It was
well known that they were preventing civilians from leaving.
So, I think the fall of El Fasher really speaks to the total
lack of action on the part of the international community
around the war in Sudan in general, but particularly around
El Fasher and what we’re seeing now in a city called El
Obeid.
And part of that inaction is a lack of
recognition for the fact that this is not just a civil war
between two Sudanese generals, but it’s a proxy war,
fueled by external actors that have a lot of money and
power. And on the side of the RSF, it is fueled by the
United Arab Emirates. And we saw in the lead-up to the fall
of El Fasher a huge uptick in flights carrying weapons from
the Emirates, mostly through Libya, some through Chad. All
of those weapons were funneling into Darfur. Troops were
being trained by UAE-backed mercenaries and then sent back
to Darfur, sent back to El Fasher. And all that support was
really deemed as a critical element of why, ultimately, the
RSF was able to take El Fasher. So, not only is there a sort
of lack of action when it comes to actively intervening, but
there’s, you know, I would say, a lack of honesty or moral
courage in terms of actually calling out what the true
factors are in driving this war.
AMY
GOODMAN: So, I wanted to go back to a top human
rights investigator in the United Kingdom saying the British
government was uniquely positioned to stop the genocidal
massacre carried out by the RSF in Sudan’s El Fasher, but
failed to do so over economic interests and diplomatic ties
with the UAE. Nathaniel Raymond of the Humanitarian Research
Lab at the Yale School of Public Health submitted the
testimony to the British Parliament, detailing his team’s
efforts to warn of the threats. This is a part of what he
said.
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: I will speak
personally, and I will speak bluntly. My outrage at
institutional failure in the face of preventable genocidal
killing, I see as a duty to stay angry as the obituary and
the memorial for these people. They deserve someone to be
angry for them.
AMY GOODMAN: So,
Julia Steers, you have been covering this conflict for
years. Talk more about what Britain, what the United States
could have done, given that this is not just an internal
civil war, but it is fueled by outside countries like the
UAE.
JULIA STEERS: I think, as you
heard from Nathaniel, you know, there could have been a
recognition that there was ethnically fueled violence going
on that amounted to, you know, as the U.N. says, as
Nathaniel says, to a genocide, perhaps kicking into action
some international mechanisms that would have called for
intervention in El Fasher. But I think, in general, just
calling out the fact that the UAE is involved, or privately
putting pressure on the UAE to stop dumping so much money
and weapons into the conflict, would be a huge step that the
U.K. or the U.S. has so far been unwilling to
take.
AMY GOODMAN: And if you can
explain further, what are the gold resources in Sudan, and
also what you talked about, political Islam, and what the
UAE — why the UAE is involved with
this?
JULIA STEERS: So, Sudan has
extensive gold reserves. Both sides, the army and the RSF,
benefit from Sudan’s gold trade, both, you know, illicit
and their legal gold trade. So, that’s, of course — and,
you know, a lot of that money has for years flown through
— flowed through the UAE. The UAE also would say that they
are fighting the Sudanese Armed Forces, who are backed in
part by Egypt, but also, within a Sudanese political
context, have a history of being backed by the Islamist
party in Sudan. So, preventing the Sudanese Armed Forces,
their leader, General Burhan, from winning the war and then
running the government would be a priority for the UAE, who,
you know, as with their war in Yemen, don’t want Islamist
parties in power in the Horn of Africa.
AMY
GOODMAN: Let’s go to another clip from the
Fault Lines documentary, No Exit from El
Fasher. This clip features Abulgasam Sajw, the Sudanese
refugee you spoke to in Uganda.
ABULGASAM
SAJW: [translated] People were stuck between two
sides, the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces. The
army controlled the city, and the Rapid Support Forces were
surrounding the city.
JULIA STEERS:
What was it like for you to continue living in the city as
it was under siege.
ABULGASAM SAJW:
[translated] I was in El Fasher, and I started documenting
because ordinary people couldn’t represent
themselves.
JULIA STEERS: Abulgasam
was 20 years old when he became a citizen journalist. He
lived through most of the siege of El
Fasher.
ABULGASAM SAJW: [translated]
Sometimes I would be the first person to find the wounded
and people killed by bombs. Sometimes I’d find an entire
family that was killed. No one left. In this video, it was
an entire family. Just one woman left.
JULIA
STEERS: Those who survived the bombings were then
starved. The RSF encircled the city and cut off food
supplies, leading to mass
starvation.
ABULGASAM SAJW:
[translated] People were only eating what they had at home.
They had to resort to animal feed. I documented people
eating animal feed. I documented people eating tree leaves.
I documented people crying from hunger.
AMY
GOODMAN: So, Julia Steers, if you can talk about
where you found this traumatized Sudanese refugee? We’ve
talked about the thousands of deaths, but also the diaspora,
people forced, like him, to other countries, like
Uganda.
JULIA STEERS: Up to 12
million Sudanese people displaced by this war. It’s an
absolutely massive number of people who have had to flee.
And most of them have fled multiple times, within Sudan
during the war and then — and then to finally leave Sudan.
Many of the people from El Fasher fled next door to Chad,
but we went to Uganda to meet refugees from El Fasher there,
including Abulgasam. And, you know, I think his story and
the stories of the others — there’s three other refugees
who fled from El Fasher in the documentary, and we really
tried to highlight the human toll of the fall of El Fasher,
because I think that’s something that, you know, to the
extent that you even hear about the war in Sudan, you’re
not hearing about the real people who are being impacted by
it, like Abulgasam.
AMY GOODMAN: And
as we wrap up now, taking this forward, you have the United
Nations holding a Security Council meeting last week,
because what happened in El Fasher, they are warning, is
unfolding in Sudan’s besieged city of El Obeid. Where you
see this all going?
JULIA STEERS: So,
for those of us who have covered the fall of El Fasher, it
feels like a nightmare repeating itself. So, the warnings
are very similar to the warnings in the lead-up to El
Fasher. And, you know, we know both sides now. Neither the
Sudanese Armed Forces nor the RSF are showing any restraint
in the last few weeks when it comes to drone attacks on
civilians. There’s now these red alert warnings for
humanitarian catastrophes within El Obeid. It’s another
critical city. It’s an important strategic city for the
RSF. It would enable them to control a key supply
route.
And so, it’s heartening to hear these
warnings, but we’ve also heard them before. So, I hope
that these warnings kick into gear some mechanism of the
international community and the humanitarian response that
is needed in El Obeid, so that we don’t see a repeat of
what we saw in El Fasher.
AMY
GOODMAN: Julia Steers, thanks so much for being
with us, award-winning journalist, documentary filmmaker.
Her new film for Evident Media-Lighthouse Reports is
Inside the Secret Network Fueling Sudan’s War. Her
earlier film for Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines, No
Exit from El Fasher, also the producer of both films.
She is based in Nairobi, Kenya. To see Part
1 of our discussion, go to democracynow.org. I’m Amy
Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.
The
original content of this program is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0
United States License. Please attribute legal
copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s)
that this program incorporates, however, may be separately
licensed. For further information or additional permissions,
contact
us.
