Category World News

The United Nations Human Rights Office in Sudan says that “brutal attacks” are escalating in el-Fasher after the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) seized the city in the western region of Darfur last month.

“Over the past 10 days, el-Fasher has witnessed an escalation of brutal attacks. It has become a city of grief,” Li Fung, the UN’s human rights representative in Sudan, said in a video published on X on Saturday.

“Civilians who survived 18 months of siege and hostilities are now enduring atrocities of an unimaginable scale,” she said.

“Hundreds have been killed, including women, children and the wounded, who sought safety in hospitals and schools. Entire families were cut down as they fled. Others have simply vanished.”

The warning comes as aid groups said that thousands of people who fled the capital of North Darfur state face dire conditions in the town of Tawila.

Adam Rojal, the spokesperson for the Sudan’s IDPs and Refugee Camps aid group, told the Associated Press (AP) news agency that more than 16,000 people had arrived in Tawila, with many in desperate need of food, medicine, shelter materials and psychological support.

Video footage from the aid group showed displaced people in a barren area with barely enough tents, many of them improvised from patched tarps and sheets. Rojal said that some families were surviving on just one meal a day.

On Friday, Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, reported “extremely high levels of malnutrition among children and adults”.

Mathilde Vu, the advocacy manager for the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) in Sudan, told the AFP news agency that many families arriving in Tawila came with “children who are not their own”.

“That means that they have to come with children who have lost their parents on the way, either because they’ve been disappeared, disappeared in a chaos, or they’ve been detained, or they’ve been killed,” she said.

Tawila is just one of several locations to which people fled after the RSF took over el-Fasher, the last Sudanese military stronghold in Sudan’s western Darfur region, on October 26.

A report from Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab on October 28 found evidence of “mass killings”, including apparent pools of blood that were visible in satellite imagery.

The International Organization for Migration estimates that about 82,000 people had fled the city and surrounding areas as of November 4, heading to Tawila, Kebkabiya, Melit and Kutum.

El-Fasher had a population of approximately 260,000 before the RSF takeover. The UN’s human rights chief, Volker Turk, said on Friday that civilians still trapped there were being prevented from leaving.

“I fear that the abominable atrocities such as summary executions, rape and ethnically motivated violence are continuing within the city,” he added.

El-Obeid braces for RSF assault

As the humanitarian crisis in Darfur spirals, the conflict has spread to the neighbouring Kordofan region.

Early this week, a drone attack in el-Obeid, the capital of the North Kordofan province, killed at least 40 people and wounded dozens more.

A military official speaking on condition of anonymity told the AP on Saturday that the army intercepted two Chinese-made drones targeting el-Obeid on Saturday morning.

Locals’ fears of an RSF assault have been heightened by the group’s recent capture of the town of Bara, located about 60km (36 miles) north, which had prompted more than 36,000 people to flee the town, according to the UN.

El-Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan state, sits on a key supply route linking Darfur and Khartoum, which is roughly 400km (250 miles) away.

Its takeover would be a strategic prize for the RSF, which has been at war with Sudan’s army since April 2023.

Ceasefire proposal

At least 40,000 people have been killed by the conflict, according to the World Health Organization. Aid groups say the true death toll could be many times higher.

After two years of war, there appears to be no sign of de-escalation, despite a truce proposal put forward by the Quad, a group comprising international mediators – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the United States.

On Thursday, the RSF had responded positively to the idea, though the following day, explosions were reported in the Khartoum area and the town of Atbara to the north of the capital – both are held by the army.

The ceasefire plan would see a three-month humanitarian pause, followed by a permanent ceasefire that would ostensibly pave the way for an eventual political transition to civilian government.

However, the government, backed by the army, which controls most of Sudan’s north, east and centre, including Khartoum, has yet to publicly respond to the proposal.

On Saturday, Darfur Governor Minni Arko Minnawi said on X that any ceasefire that did not provide for the RSF’s withdrawal would mean Sudan’s division.

This week, Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani made history by becoming the first Muslim mayor of New York City. His road to victory was anything but smooth. After he secured a historic win in the mayoral primary, he faced a landslide of attacks from across the political spectrum. In the months that followed, the hateful rhetoric from right-wing provocateurs, social media personalities, and even his three opponents mushroomed.

Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa claimed that Mamdani supports “global jihad”; independent candidate and former New York governor Andrew Cuomo agreed with a comment that Mamdani would celebrate “another 9/11”; and outgoing NYC mayor, Eric Adams, who dropped out and endorsed Cuomo, suggested that a Mamdani mayorship would turn New York into Europe, where “Islamic extremists … are destroying communities.”

Sadly, as researchers of anti-Muslim bias, and Muslim individuals who came of age in a post-9/11 America, we know attacks of this nature – on someone’s character or fitness for a job because of their religious background or national origin – aren’t entirely unexpected. We know that Islamophobia spikes not after a violent act, but rather during election campaigns and political events, when anti-Muslim rhetoric is used as a political tactic to garner support for a specific candidate or policy.

Worryingly, these attacks also reflect a general trend of rising Islamophobia, which our research has recently uncovered. The latest edition of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding’s (ISPU) American Muslim Poll, which contains our Islamophobia Index, released on October 21, reveals that in the last three years, Islamophobia has sharply risen in the US, across almost all demographic groups.

Among the general population in the US, on our 1 to 100 scale, the index increased from a score of 25 in 2022 to a score of 33 in 2025. This jump was most pronounced among white Evangelicals, whose score increased from 30 to 45 between 2022 and 2025, and Catholics, whose score increased from 28 to 40 during the same period. Protestants also saw a rise of 7 points, from 23 in 2022 to 30 in 2025. Jews had an Islamophobia score of 17 in 2022, the lowest of any group that year, which increased only slightly to 19 in 2025, the same score as Muslims in 2025. The only group that did not change since 2022 is the non-affiliated.

Undoubtedly, the weaponisation of Islamophobia by high-profile individuals is a major driver of this worrying trend. And it can lead to devastating outcomes for Muslims: From job loss and inability to freely worship, to religious-based bullying of Muslim children in public schools and discrimination in public settings, to even physical violence. Simply put, dangerous rhetoric can have dangerous consequences.

Much of this Islamophobic rhetoric relies on five common stereotypes about Muslims, which we used in putting together our index: That they condone violence, discriminate against women, are hostile to the US, are less civilised, and are complicit in acts of violence committed by Muslims elsewhere. We then surveyed a nationally representative sample, including 2,486 Americans, to identify the extent to which they believed in these tropes.

More Americans are embracing these stereotypes about Muslims, even though they are easily disproved.

For example, despite popular media portrayals of Muslims as more prone to violence or as being complicit in violence perpetrated by Muslims elsewhere in the world, ISPU research shows American Muslims overwhelmingly reject violence. They are more likely than the general public to reject violence carried out by the military against civilians and are as likely to reject individual actors targeting civilians.

The popular stereotype that Muslim communities discriminate against their women also does not hold water. The fact is that Muslim women face more racial and religious discrimination than they do gender discrimination, which all women, Muslim or not, report at equal levels in the United States. The vast majority (99 percent) of Muslim women who wear hijab say they do so out of personal devotion and choice – not coercion. And Muslim women report that their faith is a source of pride and happiness.

Our research also disproves the belief that most Muslims living in the US are hostile to the country. We have found that Muslims with strong religious identities are more likely than those with weaker ones to hold a strong American identity. It also shows that Muslims participate in public life from the local to the national level through civic engagement, working with neighbours to solve community problems, and contributing during times of national crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and the Flint water crisis.

The trope that most Muslims living in the US are less “civilised” than other people has no factual basis, as well. The use of the “civilised/uncivilised” dichotomy strips individuals of their human dignity and separates people into a false, ethnocentric hierarchy on the basis of race or religion. Accusing a group of being less civilised than another is a frequently used dehumanising tactic. Dehumanisation, defined by Genocide Watch as when one group denies the humanity of the other group, is a step on the path to genocide.

We have seen all of these tropes activated in the past few weeks to launch Islamophobic attacks on Mamdani. We have also seen too many of our politicians and public figures use them comfortably in their public speech, placing an entire faith community in harm’s way. As Mamdani said in a speech addressing the Islamophobic attacks by his fellow candidates, “In an era of ever-diminishing bipartisanship, it seems that Islamophobia has emerged as one of the few areas of agreement.”

But Islamophobia isn’t just bad for Muslims – it undermines our democracy and constitutional freedoms. Research has linked belief in these anti-Muslim tropes to greater tolerance for anti-democratic policies. People who embrace Islamophobic beliefs are more likely to agree to limiting democratic freedoms when the country is under threat (suspending checks and balances, limiting freedom of the press), condone military and individual attacks on civilians (a war crime under the Geneva Convention), and approve of discriminatory policies targeting Muslims (banning Muslims, surveilling mosques, and even restricting the ability to vote).

Weaponising Islamophobia in political speech may be perceived as a winning strategy to rally support, but communities where it is deployed end up losing. That is why such practices must be challenged. Confronting and denouncing hate means preserving democracy and human dignity. Perhaps the election of Mamdani will signal a real shift away from this political strategy. As the mayor-elect said in his acceptance speech, “No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election.”