How Sudan’s genocide was tracked from space for three years

The tragedy of how the world simply ignored early warning signs

I’ve been following Sudan for a long time.

It sits close to my heart in a way that’s hard to explain to people who haven’t been paying attention, and I know most people haven’t. Which is part of what makes this so hard to sit with.

This month marks three years since the war began. Three years. And somehow, we are now entering the fourth.

I keep repeating that to myself because it doesn’t feel real when I say it out loud. I just finished an interview that I genuinely don’t know how to come down from.

There’s a kind of restlessness in my chest, like something hasn’t settled properly. And like always, when I don’t know where to put my feelings, I write it out. So, bear with me.

I spoke with Nathaniel Raymond, Executive Director of Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, a man who has spent 26 years investigating war crimes.

I went into our conversation thinking I was going to learn about how war crimes are verified in Sudan. And I did.

But what I walked away with was something I didn’t expect, the image of a 45-year-old war crimes investigator, one of the most experienced in the world, standing in front of the UN Security Council in July 2023 and begging.

I felt something drop in my stomach when he said that. I’ve interviewed a lot of people, and I can’t remember the last time a single word made me feel that unsettled.

He told me:

“I’m angry all the time since July 2023. That’s when we privately briefed the UN Security Council for the first time of seven as it relates to El Fasher. I had never before in my life begged. And I begged the UN Security Council to send troops to El Fasher to try to protect the people who were there because we knew what the Rapid Support Forces were going to do.”

Seven briefings. He said seven. And I just kept thinking about what it must feel like to walk into that room, lay the evidence on the table, and watch nothing happen. Then do it again. Then again. Then again.

Here is what three years of war in Sudan actually looks like, if you’re willing to sit with it.

YEAR ONE: 2023

The war erupted on April 15, 2023 after two generals who had jointly staged a coup, and who had ruled Sudan’s transitional government together, and were supposed to be shepherding the country toward democracy, turned their weapons on each other instead. What followed almost immediately, was a war on civilians. It has now been described by the United Nations as the worst humanitarian catastrophe on the planet. Not one of the worst. The worst.

And most people have abandoned it.

Three months into the war, Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab had already gathered enough evidence to warn the US Government, the United Nations, and the Security Council directly. They said a genocidal massacre would happen if El Fasher fell to the RSF.

Think about that for a moment. Three months in and the warning was already on the table.

Raymond and his team were doing something that sounds almost impossible, piecing together ground-level truth from satellites orbiting 450 miles above the earth. In Sudan, where journalists can’t safely operate and aid workers can’t safely reach entire regions, that is often one of the few ways to prove what’s happening at all. So, they measured. They tracked. They cross-checked everything. And they went to New York and they begged.

The UN Security Council didn’t act.

YEAR TWO: 2024

By 2024, everything they had warned about was already unfolding. The RSF had begun their siege of El Fasher, the last major government stronghold in Darfur, still outside their control, home to hundreds of thousands of civilians and internally displaced people who had already survived the Darfur genocide of the 2000s. Satellite images showed something happening simultaneously in the farmland surrounding it. The RSF began systematically burning the farming communities surrounding the city. This is the part of the conversation where I felt physically uncomfortable. I remember shifting in my seat, like my body was trying to create distance from what I was hearing.

Between March and June 2024, at least 41 farming villages around El Fasher were destroyed through arson. One village was burned seven times. These weren’t random acts of destruction but communities that grew the food that fed the entire city. They were predominantly Zaghawa communities, the same ethnic group the RSF was targeting inside El Fasher itself.

This is the part that made my stomach turn during the interview. Because what YHRL proved scientifically, forensically, from space is that the RSF were engineering starvation. Deliberately. Methodically. And they could prove it. I asked Raymond how do you prove genocidal intent, especially through satellite imagery. Essentially what they’re describing here is a forensic investigation, except the crime scene is hundreds of miles below.

Raymond explained it like this:

“We are measuring the length of objects. We are measuring colour. We are measuring the way objects behave in reference to each other and the way objects change over time as it relates specifically to our work on proving intentional starvation. The fire events go up over 500% versus previous years and they are all localized to communities that are ethnically in the target set for the Rapid Support Forces. What this report ends up doing is being able to prove intent without the statements of the perpetrator being required. They intended to specifically burn these communities in these ways and in each case, they have a specific repeating effect on food security for the population in El Fasher, Abu Shouk, El Salam and Zamzam camps.”

Fire events all producing the same outcome, with farmers displaced, fields dying, and a city slowly being starved from the outside in. They had the forensic methodology to stand up in an international court and demonstrate, without a confession, that this was genocide by design. The data showed a map of intent and that map was presented to the people with the power to act. They didn’t. Even writing this now, I feel that same tightness in my chest. Because it’s one thing to hear and see violence. It’s another to understand that it’s being calculated in that way, with that level of intent.

YEAR THREE: 2025

I’ll be honest, this is the section I had to stop writing halfway through and come back to. In April 2025, the RSF attacked Zamzam Camp, one of the largest internally displaced persons camps on earth, killing civilians, burning homes, and driving over 400,000 people out into the desert.

People who had already been displaced once, twice, some of them three times over. In October, the RSF had built a literal earthen wall around El Fasher, sealing the city shut. It fell on October 26th, 2025, after 500 days under siege. In the days that followed, satellite imagery identified over 150 clusters of objects consistent with human bodies on the ground. Raymond told me that the grass was growing through the market stalls. The stalls were falling over. And a city was emptied.

I don’t know why that detail has stayed with me more than anything else, but it has. Maybe because it makes the absence feel real. A city doesn’t just disappear, but in that moment, it kind of did. By late 2025, Sudan had effectively split in two. The RSF controlled large parts of Darfur, while the national army held the east and the capital regions.

The country that was once home to one of Africa’s most hopeful democratic uprisings had become a fractured, bleeding thing that the world had largely stopped looking at. In 2025, satellite images of El Fasher showed blood from space. Red discolouration on the ground, visible from orbit. It was the images that finally made the world wake up to Sudan. YHRL documented it, published it and for a moment the world briefly sat up and paid attention. And then moved on.

Raymond told me what he believes happened there:

“We watched the city get murdered preventably from space, in an event that probably killed as many people as the nuclear detonation in Nagasaki. It was one of the single largest mass casualty events in human history since World War 2. It was the most accurately predicted, the most precisely in detailed warning, over two and a half years before completion of the massacre, where we had exquisite intelligence about what they were trying to do and what they were going to do. Information had never been the problem. The problem was political will. The West’s relationship with the United Arab Emirates mattered more than the lives of the people in El Fasher. They didn’t matter enough. And so, they died.”

Nagasaki. The word made me go completely still. I remember just sitting there, not even writing anything down for a moment, just letting that word hang in the air. I’m still sitting with it now, if I’m being honest. I don’t think I’ve fully processed it. There was something else that he said that I sat with for a long time after the interview ended. The one I keep coming back to.

“The West’s relationship with the UAE mattered more than the lives of the people in El Fasher.”

This is not a conspiracy theory, or an activist’s rhetoric. It is a forensic conclusion, from a 26-year veteran of war crimes investigation, who watched it happen from space and is still angry about it three years later. As he should be. As we all should be.

WHERE WE ARE NOW

Today, Sudan enters its fourth year of war. Right now, 34 million Sudanese people need humanitarian support.

That’s nearly two thirds of the entire country. 14 million people have been displaced, a quarter of the entire country’s population. 21 million face acute food insecurity. Some estimates put the death toll at 400,000. The numbers are so large they almost stop feeling real, and I hate that, because they are real.

And what scares me is that the same pattern is starting again that preceded the fall of El Fasher and is emerging in El Obeid, a city in Kordofan currently under RSF siege. Amnesty International has warned that the window to prevent a repeat of El Fasher is fast closing. We have seen this before. We know how it ends.

THE THING I KEEP THINKING ABOUT

Raymond has spent 26 years investigating war crimes. He filed almost 70 reports on El Fasher alone. He briefed the Security Council seven times.

And El Fasher fell exactly the way he said it would. He is angry. And there’s something about that anger that feels justified in a way I don’t think I can fully put into words.

The evidence was visible from space. Three years into this war, going into a fourth, the evidence hasn’t changed. Only the scale has. I don’t really have a neat way to end this. I don’t think there is one. I just know I couldn’t sit with all of this and not write it down.

Until next time.

Z