The total collapse of defences in the besieged city of el-Fasher in Sudan’s Darfur was precipitated by a communications blackout that left troops confused and isolated as Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fighters closed in, soldiers who fought in the city, commanders and a telecoms worker told Middle East Eye.
According to the soldiers, who are part of the Joint Forces, former Darfuri rebels fighting alongside the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), all communications devices became unusable on 26 October as the battle hung in the balance.
That afternoon, the soldiers and two Joint Forces commanders said, the main operations room was suddenly unable to contact the military command in Khartoum, the political leadership in Port Sudan or their troops on the frontline.
Officers then decided that night to withdraw their forces from el-Fasher, the sources said, leaving the city, where 260,000 people had been trapped under siege for 18 months, to the RSF.
While most SAF and Joint Forces commanders escaped, many soldiers did not receive the order to withdraw and so died fighting, were killed fleeing or had to find safety alone.
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Videos, photographs and satellite imagery have shown widespread massacres committed by the RSF in el-Fasher against civilians.
Survivors have described to MEE witnessing summary executions, rape and various other kinds of abuse.
The el-Fasher Resistance Committee pro-democracy group accused the military of abandoning the city, and Sky News cited “insiders” as saying SAF accepted an “indirect deal” to withdraw.
However, soldiers, commanders and officials insisted to MEE that no deal was struck, and the chaotic withdrawal was caused by the total communications blackout.
“Sophisticated weapons – especially drones – were supplied to the RSF in el-Fasher by the UAE, in addition to mercenaries and other assistance. But the most effective thing was the jamming that separated the units on the ground from each other,” Mohammed Hamado, an aide to Darfur Governor Minni Minawi, told MEE.
“When the front of the forces lost communication with the rear and the defensive positions, that means you can’t continue fighting.”
Four lines of defence
For more than 500 days, the RSF laid siege to el-Fasher, surrounding the city with 31km of earth walls to stop anyone fleeing.
The paramilitaries have shelled the city and staged repeated attacks in recent months. But until late October, SAF soldiers, Joint Forces troops and youth who mobilised to defend el-Fasher had managed to keep the RSF at bay.
MEE’s sources described four lines of defences.
“The first was barricades on the frontline surrounded by trenches and backed by military vehicles carrying mobile forces armed with light cannons and heavy guns,” one of the Joint Forces soldiers said.
“The second level was mobile special forces that deployed in large tunnels that covered hundreds of metres underground, which backed the barricades and were used to repeatedly attack the waves of RSF fighters when they tried to enter the city.”
Beyond that were two bases: the Sixth Infantry garrison, where SAF was based, and the former UN mission’s headquarters, where the Joint Forces resided.
“These were surround by anti-personnel and vehicle mines and deep trenches, with reinforced entrances,” the source said.
The fourth line of defence, the sources said, were tank and artillery units, as well as drone operators.
For 18 months, soldiers and civilians in the North Darfur capital were cut off from the outside world. Resupplies of weapons, fuel and ammunition were rare, with air drops ceasing after the RSF shot down a cargo plane in October last year.
Medics treating civilians who managed to escape el-Fasher for Tawila, a town in North Darfur, have said almost everyone displays symptoms of malnutrition. Famine was officially declared in displacement camps outside the city before they were taken by the RSF.
In such circumstances, el-Fasher’s defenders adopted ambush tactics to counter their enemy, which have been repeatedly supplied with advanced weaponry by the RSF’s patron, the United Arab Emirates.
“At many times we coaxed the RSF into the city and then ambushed them from the tunnels, using intensive fire and drones to inflict maximum harm and losses,” the second soldier said.
“One of the most successful operations using this tactic was in September, when we allowed the RSF to enter the Darfur Joint Forces base and surrounded them from different directions, killing a lot of them.”
Occasional offences of their own were staged “when we got good intelligence about RSF weaknesses in some areas” the soldier said, “so we managed to get fuel, munitions, vehicles and other supplies”.
‘Unprecedented’ attack
Despite these tactics, the RSF was day by day making advances and had taken some positions within the city’s outskirts.
The soldiers describe being outgunned by fighters using sophisticated equipment, such as the Chinese drones supplied by the UAE.
“The difference between our forces was very big,” the second soldier said.
On 21 October, just before RSF and SAF delegations flew to Washington for US-sponsored ceasefire talks, the paramilitaries began their assault. Soldiers and mobilised youth have described the attack to MEE as the most ferocious yet.
The first soldier called it “unprecedented”, saying the RSF advanced on five fronts.
“We heard that they brought more forces to the outskirts of el-Fasher headed by Abdul-Rahim Dagalo,” he said, referring to the brother and second-in-command of RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who is better known as Hemedti.
‘The army base was not a major position, as troops had been deployed elsewhere long before’
– Joint Forces soldier
“On 22 October, the RSF managed to enter the city after they defeated our checkpoints at the eastern entrances of the city. By the next day, they were near the army base and they succeeded to enter the presidential palace and the governor’s residence, which is only few a metres from the army base.”
According to the sources, this is when the military leadership in the city decided to allow the RSF to enter the Sixth Infantry garrison with the intention of ambushing its fighters once inside, as they had with the Joint Forces base previously.
“It’s important to point out that the army base was not a major position, as troops had been deployed elsewhere long before. You can notice in the RSF videos that there was no military equipment in the base when they entered,” the second soldier said.
The RSF began attacking the garrison early on Sunday morning. “By sunrise they were inside the trap,” the soldier said.
“Then we began our counterattack in the afternoon, and our reconnaissance force actually entered the army base at around 3pm, and we were ready to attack them as the RSF was celebrating and making videos.”
MEE has reviewed a photograph which appears to show two Joint Forces soldiers inside the garrison that the sources say was taken on the afternoon of 26 October after the RSF announced it had taken the base and released videos of its forces there. MEE was unable to verify when it was taken.
Just as the counteroffensive had begun, the sources said, the soldiers found they were unable to communicate with each other.
“The operations room lost the connection with the forces on the ground and we tried to reset the system many times, but we failed,” the second soldier said.
“We tried everything – the radios, the Thuraya satellite phones and the Motorola walkie-talkies – but all the devices were interrupted.”
Complex jamming operation
Sudan’s infrastructure has been devastated since the war broke out in April 2023, including telecommunications services.
Since February 2024, when a cellular blackout struck the country’s three main mobile network operators, those firms have only been able reach 30 percent of their previous clients.
In el-Fasher, Sudanese under siege have only been able to use the Starlink satellite internet service to contact the outside world over the past few months.
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The military, meanwhile, also had satellite phones made by Thuraya, a UAE-based company.
According to a source from an international telecommunications company in Sudan, telecoms systems experienced severe disruption from 24-26 October across the regions of Darfur and Kordofan.
Mobile phone signals and internet services were severely impacted as the RSF seized el-Fasher and Bara, a town in North Kordofan taken the same weekend, he said.
Meanwhile, a Sudanese tech expert told MEE that people who managed to flee el-Fasher told him that they were unable to connect to Starlink in the days before the city was taken.
“My sources told me that two drones were flying over the Darja Awla neighbourhood every day for five hours at a time. Whenever they were in the air, people could not connect to Starlink,” he said.
“The drones seemed new, their type was unfamiliar. People in el-Fasher had not reported such issues connecting to Starlink before.”
Middle East Eye has asked SpaceX, Starlink’s parent company, for comment.
Tech and military experts told MEE that interfering with satellite connections was not necessarily a complex operation and jamming such services has been seen before in Sudan.
Large-scale satellite signal jamming was recorded off the Sudanese coast in August, and when MEE visited Port Sudan in May GPS services were not working in the city.
“Thuraya satellite phones can be jammed or eavesdropped on,” the source in the telecoms company said.
“The jamming or hacking of Starlink is more difficult but not impossible.”
However, Etienne Maynier, a technologist at Human Rights Watch, told MEE that it would be “pretty complex to jam many frequencies from radio to satellite phones”.
Two weeks before el-Fasher fell, an image emerged online purportedly showing an RSF fighter with a Chinese-made Wolves Team drone jammer mounted on a truck.
Drone jammers overload signals used by the aircraft, mostly by targeting specific frequencies.
The Wolves Team system has a range of 2.5km and reportedly disrupts signals across multiple frequencies.
Tech experts said in theory this could be used to target comms devices, but it was not certain the system could be used for a blackout like the one reported on 26 October.
Also circulating online in recent days is a photo appearing to show a member of the RSF carrying a drone-jamming system on his back.
Mohammed al-Amin Abdul Aziz, a leading member of the former rebel faction, Sudan Liberation Movement, which is part of the Joint Forces, claimed the image shows a Chinese-made Norinco drone jamming system.
While MEE was unable to confirm the model, it is consistent with Chinese backpack-mounted multi-band radio frequency jammers.
Abdul Aziz told MEE the tech was supplied by the UAE and said the comms blackout sparked the collapse of the defences.
“There was no deal in this withdrawal and it happened according to the assessment of our forces on the ground after they lost the connection with the units on the ground,” he said.
Middle East Eye has asked Wolves Team and Norinco for comment.
Thuraya said it could only confirm its phones experienced disruption if the exact SIM IDs could be provided.
“We are not in a position to comment on external reports or assumptions,” it said.
University meeting
As night fell in el-Fasher on 26 October, commanders in the operations room decided to continue the battle despite being cut off from their troops and the leadership in Khartoum.
“We were waiting for sunset to use the cover of night to repair the system and conduct an attack – or at least to use the liaison officers to communicate with the units on the ground,” the first soldier said.
The SAF and Joint Forces commanders were operating out of the University of el-Fasher, after deploying there earlier in the battle.
“We got them to the university by making it seem the leadership were among the tank and artillery units in the north of the city while we brought them to the university,” the soldier said.
After comms had been cut, officers from various units were gathered together at the university, which the soldier described as a “difficult process”.
“Some of the officers used vehicles without lights to avoid the RSF forces, and others walked in the night, but we also lost many officers and soldiers during these operations,” he said.
“Finally, we succeeded to gather the leadership to sit, evaluate and decide the next step.”
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Once convened, the commanders and officers decided to withdraw.
“The leadership assessed the situation and found it impossible to continue fighting without being able to communicate with the units and receive instructions from the headquarters,” the first soldier said.
According to a source close to Sudanese Prime Minister Kamal Idriss, the commanders in el-Fasher were able to reach the military leadership through a Starlink connection to get the withdrawal plan approved.
The plan, sources said, was to get senior commanders out of the city first. Once that happened, most heavy weapons and equipment were removed.
“If you notice, none of the leaders were detained and the heavy military equipment didn’t fall into the hands of the RSF,” the first soldier said.
But the pullout descended into a chaotic bloodbath.
“In one of the attempts to withdraw, SAF leaders hid in a hospital, which was bombed by drones shortly after they left it,” the source close to Idriss said.
Meanwhile, defending troops in the city’s north and elsewhere were unaware there was any order to leave the city and were left behind alongside el-Fasher’s long-suffering civilians.
