Nov. 7, 2025, 5:00 PM ESTBy Sara MonettaMalnourished and dehydrated people are crawling through the desert on their elbows and knees in constant terror of being caught by fighters from Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), humanitarian organizations have warned.The journey from the RSF-controlled city of el-Fasher to the town of Tawila is just 30 miles, but nonetheless perilous as gunmen rove around, robbing people, taking them hostage and in some cases slaughtering them by the dozen, the organizations say.Under international pressure, the RSF said Thursday that it was willing to engage in a U.S.-brokered humanitarian ceasefire. But the Sudanese military, which it has been fighting since April 2023, has yet to agree to a truce, and the State Department has said it is still working to get both parties to agree to a pause in the fighting amid warnings from the humanitarian organizations that the northeast African nation is returning to its genocidal past.While talks are ongoing, eyewitness accounts, videos shared to social media and an analysis of satellite imagery that has shown pools of blood visible from space have revealed the scale of the killing in the region and the increasing use of drone strikes by both sides as they seek to gain an advantage on the battlefield.Images of a former children’s hospital in el-Fasher show the appearance of new disturbed earth from Oct. 30, top left, to Nov. 3, bottom right.Yale Humanitarian Research Lab / VantorHanaa Abdullah Musa said RSF fighters detained her brother at one of several checkpoints she came across as she made her way to Tawila, which is home to hundreds of thousands of displaced people.“They drove him to some place,” she told NBC News in a voice note on Thursday. “Later in the evening, they told us they would bring him back, but they never did.”NBC News has asked the RSF for comment on Musa’s testimony.Musa, 20, said she had no choice but to keep moving toward Tawila after fighters took her phone and money at a previous checkpoint.She was one of only about 6,000 people to make it to the town from el-Fasher since the RSF takeover, according to humanitarian organizations working there, all of whom have expressed growing alarm about the paramilitary group’s activity in Sudan’s North Darfur.“Every single person who has arrived in Tawila has one or multiple members of their family that they cannot account for,” according to Shashwat Saraf, the country director for the Norwegian Refugee Council, a humanitarian organization that provides aid to displaced people.