AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

In Part 1 of our discussion with the filmmaker Julia Steers, we talked about her film Inside the Secret Network Fueling Sudan’s War. We talked about the role particularly of the United Arab Emirates in Sudan’s civil war and the human toll.

In Part 2 of our discussion, we’re going to continue talking about Sudan, but an earlier documentary that Julia Steers made, and it was for the Al Jazeera Fault Lines series, called No Exit from El Fasher. This is a clip.

RUQAYA JABER: [translated] Sometimes I can’t sleep because of the things I remember. I remember the dead people on the road, young people’s bodies lying side by side.

JULIA STEERS: In October 2025, the city of El Fasher in Sudan became a killing ground. Thousands of civilians trying to flee the city were hunted down and executed. According to the U.N., at least 6,000 people were killed in three days. It was a ruthless campaign to capture the city by a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, and it came after a brutal 18-month siege of El Fasher that trapped civilians inside.

RUQAYA JABER: [translated] There was no exit from El Fasher. There was no exit until the city fell. If you’re inside, you stay in. And if you’re out, you stay out. There was no exit.

AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt from No Exit from El Fasher from Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines. We are joined by Julia Steers.

Thank you for continuing us, Julia — with us, on this first documentary you did. Describe what happened in El Fasher.

JULIA STEERS: El Fasher is the capital of North Darfur. Darfur is a critical region in Sudan, and it was under siege for 18 months by both sides, the Sudan Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces. And towards the end of a really brutal 18-month siege, where civilians were bombarded from the air and attacked within the city, the Rapid Support Forces encircled the city. They dug a berm around the entire city, preventing food and humanitarian supplies from getting in. And then, during three really brutal days in late October of last year, they took the city.

The Sudanese Armed Forces retreated. But in the process, the Rapid Support Forces launched a brutal attack on civilians who were trying to flee the city. You know, at the time, people were saying the death toll was close to 10,000, but the reality is, despite really harrowing and gruesome tales coming out of El Fasher, including in our documentary, you know, the true toll of what really happened in El Fasher is unknown to this day.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s go to another clip from No Exit from El Fasher, which begins with Amnesty International’s Crisis Response Program researcher, Janine Morna.

JANINE MORNA: Nobody was really spared from the violence. And I think there’s a real dehumanizing of this population over time, over the period of the siege, that allowed for these atrocities to happen. It seems, somehow, that El Fasher was a prize that they were willing to take at any cost.

There was a time before the takeover of El Fasher where so much could have been done to save lives, where people were trying whatever they could do to ring the alarm bells and say, “We are on the precipice of something really major.” And nobody seemed to hear those cries or to take them seriously. As an international community, we couldn’t even provide people the most basic of protection during this period of time.

JULIA STEERS: U.N. investigators say the RSF strategy in El Fasher bears the hallmarks of a genocide, with the RSF specifically targeting non-Arab communities. Entire families have been wiped out.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us more, as you continue with this, and also about the role of other countries and how this could have been prevented, Julia.

JULIA STEERS: So, as Janine is saying in the documentary, you know, one of the sort of most unbelievable things about the fall of El Fasher is that we knew that it was going to happen. So, humanitarian organizations were sounding the alarm about this, you know, for many months prior to the city actually falling. There were a few sort of paltry efforts to establish a humanitarian corridor to get aid to civilians or to help civilians get out, but, really, there was just, you know, a lot of sort of diplomatic hand-wringing and acceptance that civilians were going to be trapped inside as the RSF launched this absolutely brutal attack. We could monitor from satellite imagery that they were encircling the city, that they were digging a berm around the city. It was well known that they were preventing civilians from leaving. So, I think the fall of El Fasher really speaks to the total lack of action on the part of the international community around the war in Sudan in general, but particularly around El Fasher and what we’re seeing now in a city called El Obeid.

And part of that inaction is a lack of recognition for the fact that this is not just a civil war between two Sudanese generals, but it’s a proxy war, fueled by external actors that have a lot of money and power. And on the side of the RSF, it is fueled by the United Arab Emirates. And we saw in the lead-up to the fall of El Fasher a huge uptick in flights carrying weapons from the Emirates, mostly through Libya, some through Chad. All of those weapons were funneling into Darfur. Troops were being trained by UAE-backed mercenaries and then sent back to Darfur, sent back to El Fasher. And all that support was really deemed as a critical element of why, ultimately, the RSF was able to take El Fasher. So, not only is there a sort of lack of action when it comes to actively intervening, but there’s, you know, I would say, a lack of honesty or moral courage in terms of actually calling out what the true factors are in driving this war.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I wanted to go back to a top human rights investigator in the United Kingdom saying the British government was uniquely positioned to stop the genocidal massacre carried out by the RSF in Sudan’s El Fasher, but failed to do so over economic interests and diplomatic ties with the UAE. Nathaniel Raymond of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health submitted the testimony to the British Parliament, detailing his team’s efforts to warn of the threats. This is a part of what he said.

NATHANIEL RAYMOND: I will speak personally, and I will speak bluntly. My outrage at institutional failure in the face of preventable genocidal killing, I see as a duty to stay angry as the obituary and the memorial for these people. They deserve someone to be angry for them.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Julia Steers, you have been covering this conflict for years. Talk more about what Britain, what the United States could have done, given that this is not just an internal civil war, but it is fueled by outside countries like the UAE.

JULIA STEERS: I think, as you heard from Nathaniel, you know, there could have been a recognition that there was ethnically fueled violence going on that amounted to, you know, as the U.N. says, as Nathaniel says, to a genocide, perhaps kicking into action some international mechanisms that would have called for intervention in El Fasher. But I think, in general, just calling out the fact that the UAE is involved, or privately putting pressure on the UAE to stop dumping so much money and weapons into the conflict, would be a huge step that the U.K. or the U.S. has so far been unwilling to take.

AMY GOODMAN: And if you can explain further, what are the gold resources in Sudan, and also what you talked about, political Islam, and what the UAE — why the UAE is involved with this?

JULIA STEERS: So, Sudan has extensive gold reserves. Both sides, the army and the RSF, benefit from Sudan’s gold trade, both, you know, illicit and their legal gold trade. So, that’s, of course — and, you know, a lot of that money has for years flown through — flowed through the UAE. The UAE also would say that they are fighting the Sudanese Armed Forces, who are backed in part by Egypt, but also, within a Sudanese political context, have a history of being backed by the Islamist party in Sudan. So, preventing the Sudanese Armed Forces, their leader, General Burhan, from winning the war and then running the government would be a priority for the UAE, who, you know, as with their war in Yemen, don’t want Islamist parties in power in the Horn of Africa.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to another clip from the Fault Lines documentary, No Exit from El Fasher. This clip features Abulgasam Sajw, the Sudanese refugee you spoke to in Uganda.

ABULGASAM SAJW: [translated] People were stuck between two sides, the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces. The army controlled the city, and the Rapid Support Forces were surrounding the city.

JULIA STEERS: What was it like for you to continue living in the city as it was under siege.

ABULGASAM SAJW: [translated] I was in El Fasher, and I started documenting because ordinary people couldn’t represent themselves.

JULIA STEERS: Abulgasam was 20 years old when he became a citizen journalist. He lived through most of the siege of El Fasher.

ABULGASAM SAJW: [translated] Sometimes I would be the first person to find the wounded and people killed by bombs. Sometimes I’d find an entire family that was killed. No one left. In this video, it was an entire family. Just one woman left.

JULIA STEERS: Those who survived the bombings were then starved. The RSF encircled the city and cut off food supplies, leading to mass starvation.

ABULGASAM SAJW: [translated] People were only eating what they had at home. They had to resort to animal feed. I documented people eating animal feed. I documented people eating tree leaves. I documented people crying from hunger.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Julia Steers, if you can talk about where you found this traumatized Sudanese refugee? We’ve talked about the thousands of deaths, but also the diaspora, people forced, like him, to other countries, like Uganda.

JULIA STEERS: Up to 12 million Sudanese people displaced by this war. It’s an absolutely massive number of people who have had to flee. And most of them have fled multiple times, within Sudan during the war and then — and then to finally leave Sudan. Many of the people from El Fasher fled next door to Chad, but we went to Uganda to meet refugees from El Fasher there, including Abulgasam. And, you know, I think his story and the stories of the others — there’s three other refugees who fled from El Fasher in the documentary, and we really tried to highlight the human toll of the fall of El Fasher, because I think that’s something that, you know, to the extent that you even hear about the war in Sudan, you’re not hearing about the real people who are being impacted by it, like Abulgasam.

AMY GOODMAN: And as we wrap up now, taking this forward, you have the United Nations holding a Security Council meeting last week, because what happened in El Fasher, they are warning, is unfolding in Sudan’s besieged city of El Obeid. Where you see this all going?

JULIA STEERS: So, for those of us who have covered the fall of El Fasher, it feels like a nightmare repeating itself. So, the warnings are very similar to the warnings in the lead-up to El Fasher. And, you know, we know both sides now. Neither the Sudanese Armed Forces nor the RSF are showing any restraint in the last few weeks when it comes to drone attacks on civilians. There’s now these red alert warnings for humanitarian catastrophes within El Obeid. It’s another critical city. It’s an important strategic city for the RSF. It would enable them to control a key supply route.

And so, it’s heartening to hear these warnings, but we’ve also heard them before. So, I hope that these warnings kick into gear some mechanism of the international community and the humanitarian response that is needed in El Obeid, so that we don’t see a repeat of what we saw in El Fasher.

AMY GOODMAN: Julia Steers, thanks so much for being with us, award-winning journalist, documentary filmmaker. Her new film for Evident Media-Lighthouse Reports is Inside the Secret Network Fueling Sudan’s War. Her earlier film for Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines, No Exit from El Fasher, also the producer of both films. She is based in Nairobi, Kenya. To see Part 1 of our discussion, go to democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.