Qualla: El Fasher

El Fasher: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Evon2023, CC0. A pizza parlor once opened in El Fasher. That detail reads strangely today, but for a stretch of years in the early 2000s the city was booming. Aid workers arrived by the planeload to run the response to the first Darfur genocide. Rents rose, gas stations tripled, bottled water appeared in shops that had never stocked it, and somewhere in the middle of the boom a pizza place began serving expatriates in a town whose average morning temperature in March is twenty-one degrees Celsius and climbs from there. The pizza parlor is gone. So are most of the 252,000 people who lived in El Fasher at the start of 2025. What remains is a city on the northern edge of Darfur that has been many things across its four hundred years: caravan post, sultan's capital, university town, refugee hub, and, for eighteen months, a besieged island in a sea of RSF advance.

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Image: Evon2023 | CC0

El Fasher: The Sultan's Town

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sudan Envoy, CC BY 2.0. El Fasher, rendered in Arabic as Al-Fashir and sometimes translated as the Capital, grew up around the palace grounds of the sultans of Darfur. The town sits at roughly 700 meters above sea level, 195 kilometers northeast of Nyala, on a plateau where three climate seasons divide ...

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Image: Sudan Envoy | CC BY 2.0

El Fasher: Town and Gown

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RomanDeckert, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1990, President Omar al-Bashir decreed a new university for the city, and Al Fashir University opened in February 1991 on grounds west of the airport and south of Al Fashir Secondary School. For a city that had always been a market town first, the university was a turn. Studen...

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Image: RomanDeckert | CC BY-SA 4.0

El Fasher: The Boom That Came With the War

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, CC BY-SA 4.0. When the first Darfur conflict tore through the countryside in 2003, El Fasher became a gathering point for the displaced. The camps that grew alongside the city, Zamzam, Abu Shouk, and Al Salam, held hundreds of thousands of people from the Fur, Masalit, Zaghawa, and other commu...

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Image: Unknown author | CC BY-SA 4.0

El Fasher: Siege

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MartinKassemJ120, CC0. The civil war that began on 15 April 2023 put the RSF on the offensive across most of Sudan, including all of Darfur except El Fasher. The city, defended by the Sudanese Armed Forces and allied former rebel groups from the region, became the last North Darfur holdout. The siege b...

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Image: MartinKassemJ120 | CC0

El Fasher: What a City Holds

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Abdel-Moneim Mustafa, CC BY-SA 4.0. El Fasher's symbolism has not died, an Al Jazeera analysis argued in December 2025. The city was where Ali Dinar made his last stand for Darfuri independence in 1916, and it was where, more than a century later, a coalition of government forces and Darfuri militias tried to hold ...

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Image: Abdel-Moneim Mustafa | CC BY-SA 4.0