I'm sitting in my apartment in Rimini right now, and I can't stop thinking about distance. Not the kind you measure in kilometers, but the kind that exists between knowing something terrible is happening and actually feeling it in your bones. The kind that lets us scroll past horror with our morning coffee.
You've probably heard people say that we're desensitized to violence. The news cycle moves too fast. Africa is too far away to care about. But here's what I want you to sit with for a moment: What if the problem isn't that we don't care, but that we've been trained not to look? What if we've convinced ourselves that some tragedies are too complex, too distant, too "over there" to deserve our attention? And what if—stay with me here—that's exactly what allows massacres to unfold while we debate whether we should care?
Let me tell you about El Fasher, and why everything you think you know about how the world responds to genocide might be wrong.
The City That Fell While We Looked Away
El Fasher is a city in Sudan's Darfur region. Last week, it fell to a paramilitary force called the Rapid Support Forces—the RSF. If you're thinking, "I've heard of Darfur before," you're right. Twenty years ago, Darfur became synonymous with genocide. George Clooney made it a cause. World leaders condemned it. China faced pressure over its oil investments there .
Now it's happening again. Same place. Same ethnic tensions. Same paramilitaries—only now they're called the RSF instead of the Janjaweed, though they're essentially the same force, just better armed and organized .
Here's what makes my stomach turn: In the last seventy-two hours since the RSF took control, researchers at Yale's Humanitarian Research Lab observed something unprecedented. They analyzed satellite imagery and found clusters of objects measuring 1.5 to 2 meters long—the length of a human body—scattered throughout the city. These objects weren't there 36 to 48 hours earlier.
Around these objects, there's discoloration. Red discoloration. Blood visible from space.
The smell of death doesn't reach satellites, but the evidence of systematic killing does.
A Hospital Becomes a Killing Floor
Let me take you inside one building. The Saudi Maternity Hospital. On October 27th, satellite imagery showed people standing in a line at what had become an RSF detention facility . The next day, those standing figures were gone. In their place—a pile in the corner, consistent with the color and length of human bodies .
More than 460 people were killed inside that hospital, according to the World Health Organization. Patients, health workers, families seeking refuge—executed where they lay. The Sudan Doctors Network, which tracks casualties in the civil war, described fighters "cold-bloodedly killing everyone they found inside the Saudi Hospital, including patients, their companions, and anyone else present in the wards" .
At least 500 people had been seeking refuge there.
The texture of hospital sheets. The echo of footsteps in corridors. The metallic taste of fear. These sensory details belong to the survivors who fled, carrying stories the world is barely listening to.
The Massacre by Numbers
The numbers are staggering, but I need you to see them. Not just read them—see them. At least 1,500 people were killed in three days, according to medical groups . Sudan's government puts the number at 2,000 or more . Nathaniel Raymond, the researcher documenting this with satellite imagery, observed house-to-house killings in residential neighborhoods, with RSF vehicles positioned in ways "highly consistent" with systematic civilian executions .
Women who escaped told investigators that men were being separated from their families. Then came gunshots .
The city had been under siege for eighteen months . The RSF built an earthen berm—a massive wall of dirt—encircling El Fasher, trapping a quarter-million people inside . Anyone trying to smuggle food or medicine over that wall was beaten or killed . Children in the last functioning hospital were being fed animal feed because nothing else remained .
Then the wall came down. The army fled in what appears to have been a negotiated deal with the RSF . And the killing began in earnest.
The Aha Moment: We Are All Witnesses Now
Here's what keeps me awake at night, and I think this is the moment everything shifts: We live in an era where blood is visible from space, where massacres are documented in real-time by satellites and smartphones, where the evidence of genocide is undeniable—and yet the world responds with what Michelle Gavin of the Council on Foreign Relations calls "limited outrage" .
Twenty years ago, Darfur became a cause célèbre. Celebrities spoke out. It was a foreign policy priority. Now? Researchers are literally showing us bodies from orbit, and the response is measured, diplomatic, muted .
The aha moment isn't about the technology. It's about us. We've become witnesses to atrocities in ways previous generations never were, and we're discovering that bearing witness doesn't automatically translate into action. We're learning that seeing isn't the same as caring, and caring isn't the same as doing something about it.
The weight of this realization—that we can see everything and still do nothing—feels heavier than any satellite image.
The Geopolitics of Looking Away
Here's where it gets complicated, and I mean really complicated. The RSF is reportedly armed and funded by the United Arab Emirates —a close partner of the United States. The Emirates denies this, but multiple reports suggest otherwise . Michelle Gavin puts it bluntly: "The U.A.E. is arming and supporting a genocidal force," yet there's been "complete unwillingness to acknowledge it" .
Why? Because geopolitics trumps genocide when the perpetrator's backer is also your ally.
Ahmed Ibrahim, a former Sudanese government official, argues this isn't just about two generals fighting for power. It's about Sudan's rare earth minerals, its Red Sea access, its resources being systematically stripped in a geopolitical restructuring of the region . The RSF was supposed to be integrated into Sudan's national army after the 2019 revolution, but "geopolitical reasons and internal politics" prevented it .
So the war that erupted in April 2023 isn't simply a civil conflict. It's a proxy battle with regional powers betting on different sides, with civilians caught in the crossfire—or rather, deliberately targeted as part of what experts are calling a continuation of the genocide that began two decades ago .
The crunch of gravel under fleeing feet. The dust that clings to everything in Darfur. The silence that follows gunfire. These aren't abstractions. They're the lived experience of a quarter-million people.
What Makes This Genocide Different
Nathaniel Raymond makes a crucial distinction about El Fasher compared to previous RSF offensives. In earlier attacks, like the one on ZamZam displacement camp, the RSF burned villages to the ground . But in El Fasher, they're not burning. They've encircled the city. They're controlling who enters and exits. And they're moving "pretty systematically, block by block" .
As they move, bodies appear in the satellite imagery. Often with discoloration around them .
"It's now going to accelerate," Raymond told ABC News. "We haven't even hit top velocity. The people that they will kill now are those who are hiding. And they're mostly women and children… Now it'll be those who were too weak to run or those men who were hiding and trying to protect them from the RSF" .
That was several days ago. The acceleration has likely begun.
The systematic nature of this killing—the methodical, block-by-block progression—is what makes researchers warn this could be genocide unfolding in real-time. The United States State Department already concluded in January that members of the RSF committed genocide in Sudan, specifically in Darfur . What we're witnessing now, Raymond says, "is the final battle of the Darfur genocide that began 20 years ago" .
The Questions We're Too Afraid to Ask
I'm writing this from Bologna, a city that knows something about history and violence. Italy has its own complicated past with colonialism in Africa. I'm sitting here in my wheelchair, relatively safe, relatively comfortable, trying to make sense of how we can live in a world where technology shows us everything and we still choose to look away.
So let me ask you directly: What does it mean that we can see blood from space and still shrug? What does it say about us that the second Darfur genocide generates less outrage than the first, even though we have better evidence, clearer documentation, and fewer excuses for ignorance?
Regional countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, and Jordan have condemned the violence . The UN Security Council has issued statements. Some members of Congress have spoken out. But where's the sustained pressure? Where's the emergency session? Where's the intervention to stop what multiple sources are calling genocide?
President Trump's special adviser to Africa is attempting to broker a ceasefire, but negotiations include diplomats from the UAE, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia—the same Arab powers accused of fueling the conflict . It's like asking arsonists to negotiate with firefighters.
What This Means for All of Us
Here's what I've learned writing for FreeAstroScience, where we try to explain complex phenomena in simple terms: Sometimes the most important scientific observation isn't in a lab or on a distant planet. Sometimes it's in the satellites overhead documenting what we're capable of doing to each other.
The technology that lets us see blood from space is the same technology that could coordinate aid, that could apply pressure, that could document war crimes for future prosecution. We have the tools. What we lack is the collective will to use them on behalf of people who don't have oil we need or geopolitical leverage we want.
The Sudan Doctors Network called what's happening "a true genocide" . They said the massacres are "an extension of what occurred in el-Fasher more than a year and a half ago, when over 14,000 civilians were killed through bombing, starvation, and extrajudicial executions" . They described it as "a deliberate and systematic campaign of killing and extermination" .
Those words—deliberate, systematic, extermination—should shake us. They describe intent. They describe planning. They describe genocide.
The Space Between Seeing and Acting
I keep coming back to that satellite imagery. To the idea that we've developed technology so sophisticated that we can measure the length of bodies from orbit, identify blood discoloration from space, and document mass killings in near real-time. We've closed the distance between atrocity and awareness to nearly zero.
And yet the distance between awareness and action remains infinite.
That's the tragedy here. Not just what's happening in El Fasher—though that's tragedy enough for a thousand lifetimes. But what's happening to us. We're becoming people who can witness genocide and file it away under "too complicated" or "not our problem" or "what can we even do?"
The dust kicked up by fleeing families settling on abandoned homes. The weight of silence in a city where children no longer play outside. The smell of a hospital that's become something else entirely. These sensations exist whether we acknowledge them or not.
Looking Forward: What Comes Next
Here's what researchers fear: With El Fasher fallen, the RSF now controls nearly all of Darfur . They're positioned to move east toward other provinces. What happened in El Fasher could be a preview of what's coming to North Kordofan and beyond .
The pattern is established. The methodology is clear. The international response is inadequate.
Unless something changes—and I mean fundamentally changes in how the world responds to genocide when it's inconvenient or when the perpetrators' backers are our allies—we're going to watch this happen again. And again. And again.
We'll have the satellite imagery. We'll have the verified videos. We'll have the testimony of survivors. We'll have every piece of evidence we could possibly need.
What we might not have is the courage to actually do something about it.
A Personal Reflection
I'm often asked why someone who writes about science and culture cares so much about events in Sudan. The answer is simple: Science taught me to look at evidence. Culture taught me that we're all connected. And my own experience navigating the world in a wheelchair taught me that societies are judged by how they treat the most vulnerable.
The most vulnerable people in the world right now are hiding in El Fasher, waiting for paramilitaries to find them. They're women and children too weak to flee. They're men trying to protect their families. They're the ones who survived the siege only to face systematic execution.
If we can see their suffering from space and still turn away, what does that make us?
I don't have a neat answer. I don't have a solution that fits in a paragraph. What I have is a question that I'm going to carry with me, and I hope you will too: In an age where atrocities are undeniable because satellites document them in real-time, what's our responsibility as witnesses?
Not as governments, diplomacy, or geopolitics. As humans. As people who can see. As individuals who now carry the knowledge of what's happening in a city, most of us couldn't find it on a map a week ago.
The smell of coffee in Rimini mingles with the bitter taste of knowledge I can't unknow. That's what bearing witness feels like in 2025. It's the collision of comfort and horror, separated by nothing but the pixels on a screen and the choice to keep looking.
We should choose to keep looking. And then, maybe, to finally do something about what we see.
Post a Comment