November 28, 2025 • 30 mins
For over 500 days, the people of El Fasher held out under a brutal siege. When the city finally fell, the world witnessed one of the deadliest mass-killing events of the war in Sudan. Through survivor testimonies, satellite evidence, and international reporting, I examine how it happened, who enabled it, and what El Fasher asks of us now.
Check out my substack page where I tackle some of the episode topics in depth and write about other issues our country and the world are facing today. https://substack.com/@ktdpodcast
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(00:01):
Imagine a city of about aquarter million people, a city
roughly the size of buffalo.
Now imagine that as war spreadsacross the region, people flee
there from every direction.
Villagers escaping massacres,families carrying their
children, entire communitiesuprooted.
Over time, that city swells.
(00:23):
Half a million, then more.
By 2024 when the fightingreached its peak, more than a
million people were trappedinside its limits.
That's more people than live inSan Francisco, trapped inside a
35 mile dirt wall.
That city is El Fasher, thecapital of North Darfur, and in
(00:45):
April, 2024, the rapid supportforces began in closing it.
Satellite imagery.
The same tools used to documentmass killings elsewhere, showed
a continuous sand bermencircling the city.
It wasn't built for defense.
It was built to cut El Fasheroff.
a wall to stop food, water, andescape.
(01:08):
UN investigators, aid agencies,and journalists all warned the
same thing.
El Fasher was being prepared forsomething catastrophic.
Inside conditions collapsed.
Hospitals ran out of supplies.
Civilians went days withoutfood.
Many survived on grass andanimal feed.
(01:28):
Food meant for livestock, nothuman beings.
Crossing RSF controlled roadsmeant risking capture, assault,
or execution.
For more than 500 days, ElFasher held out.
A siege more than three timeslonger than Stalingrad, the
longest and most brutal siege ofthe 20th century.
(01:51):
And the entire time everyone inthe city understood exactly what
would happen if the RSF brokethrough the final defenses.
They had seen.
What happened in El Genina, inBarra across Darfur, inside El
Fasher.
The greatest fear wasn't death..
It was survival.
Living long enough to endurewhat happens when a militia
(02:13):
notorious for massacres andethnic killing storms a city
already starved.
On October 26th, 2025, that fearbecame reality.
El Fasher fell.
What followed wasn't chaos.
It wasn't the fog of war.
It was a continuation of apattern of atrocities that had
(02:36):
been ongoing for nearly twoyears.
One documented by survivors,human rights groups, UN
investigators and satelliteimagery, and that leads to a
harder question, one that turnsus from a local horror into a
global story.
How was the RSF able to sustainthis war at all?
(02:58):
How did a militia with nofactories, no air force and
limited logistics wage, acountrywide conflict for two
years and build a siege wallvisible from space?
To answer that, we have to lookbeyond Sudan's borders.
Because this genocide wasn'tjust executed.
It was enabled.
(03:20):
If you want to understand how ElFasher fell, how a city became a
prison, how starvation was usedas a weapon, how a genocide
unfolded in slow motion.
You have to understand onething.
The rapid support forces, orRSF, did not wage this war
alone.
That isn't speculation.
(03:40):
It's the conclusion of USintelligence.
UN investigators and every majorregional reporting effort.
And the clearest summary of thatreality comes from one of the
most experienced US officials onSudan.
Cameron Hudson, former chief ofstaff to successive of US
special envoys for Sudan.
He told the Wall Street Journal"the war would be over if not
(04:04):
for the UAE.
The only thing keeping the RSFin this war is the overwhelming
amount of military supportthey're receiving from the
Emiratis".
Everything that follows; thedrones, the ammunition, the
fuel, the vehicles, the privatemilitary contractors, flows from
that.
Because for two years,investigators have traced the
(04:26):
same pattern.
The United Arab Emirates hasbeen supplying the RSF through
regional partners.
When you start digging into howthe RSF was supplied, the trail
of evidence extends far beyondSudan.
It goes through airports, bordercrossings, and desert airstrips
scattered across East and NorthAfrica.
(04:49):
One of the earliest knownlocations was in Entebbe,
Uganda.
In June of 2023, A UAE cargoplane landed on what was
described as a humanitarianmission.
But when airport staff openedthe crates, they didn't find
medicine or food.
They found rifles andammunition.
According to workers who spoketo the Wall Street Journal.
(05:11):
After that discovery, they weretold to stop inspecting Emirati
flights altogether, and onceinspection stopped, those
flights increased.
They weren't staying in Uganda.
They were heading west towardsone of the most unlikely
logistics hubs in Africa.
Amdjarass, a small desert townin Eastern Chad.
(05:32):
Multiple investigations,Reuters, UN experts, satellite
analysts, all converge on thesame picture.
UAE planes landed in Amdjarass.
cargo, was unloaded onto thetarmac.
From there.
RSF aligned convoys carry theshipments across the desert, a
steady line of trucks movinginto Darfur.
(05:52):
Over time, Amdjarass became theAirbridge, the logistical heart
of the RSF's war.
If you travel north fromAmdjarass, you'll find a second
major route.
One that runs straight throughEastern Libya territory.
Controlled by Khalifa Haftar,one of the UAE's closest
regional partners.
For years, UN investigators havedocumented how the Emiratis
(06:14):
moved weapons into Libya tosupport Haftar's forces.
and Reuter's flight analysisshows that many of the same
airlines previously accused offerrying Emirati weapons to
Haftar in 2019 and 2020 are nowoperating in the Amdjarass
airlift.
That's the connective tissue.
Haftar's units move supplies andpersonnel across desert roads
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into Western Sudan.
Not through improvised smugglingpaths, but through longstanding
Emirati backed networksrepurposed for a new war.
There's an Eastern corridor too.
The Wall Street Journal andReuters both tracked UAE Linked
Flights making stops in Somalia,mainly in Basaso, the Port City
in Puntland.
(06:56):
Why Basaso?
The UAE has spent yearstightening its grip there,
investing in the port, expandingsecurity ties, and operating a
military base.
This wasn't the backup route.
It was an alternate lane.
In the same system, a systemdesigned with a redundancy.
If one route became politicallysensitive, the other stayed
(07:17):
open.
That's not how a militiaoperates.
That's how a state levellogistics network functions.
And you can see that system mostclearly in the drones.
US intelligence agencies andbattlefield imagery analyzed by
the journal confirmed that theRSF began operating Chinese made
Rainbow Series drones, includingthe CH 95.
(07:40):
These drones fly for 24 hours,conduct long range surveillance
and fire precision weapons.
And here's the detail thatmatters.
Only China and the UAE possessthese drones.
And China isn't taking sides inSudan.
So if the RSF is flying CH 95'sover North Darfur.
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They didn't come from Beijing,they came from UAE.
The Yale Humanitarian ResearchLab even spotted aircraft
matching their profile in theskies above El Fasher during RSF
operations.
It wasn't just drones movingthrough these routes.
Investigators also tracedEuropean made components into
the RSF arsenal, includingSerbian made mortars and British
(08:24):
made vehicle engines movingthrough the same Emirati
networks that previously armedmilitias in Libya.
According to the New Yorker,some of these shipments crossed
the Chad border disguised ashumanitarian aid, while others
were air freighted through a UAEbase in Somalia, the very routes
already tied to Emirati cargoflights.
Then there's a Colombiancontractor story, the clearest
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sign of how far this networkextends.
In late 2024, the Colombianoutlet, La Silla Vacia, revealed
that hundreds of retiredColombian soldiers had been
recruited through a UAE linkedprivate military company with
promises of oil refinerysecurity jobs.
But once they arrived in UAE,everything changed.
(09:09):
They were flown to Benghazi,Libian forces aligned with
Khalifa haftar confiscated theirpassports, held them in
barracks, and eventually pushedthem in convoys across the
desert.
By early 2025, close to 380 ofthem had been moved into Sudan,
many assigned to train RSFfighters, including teenagers,
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while others were pulleddirectly into combat.
One contractor Christian Lombanahad his leg crushed during a
desert ambush.
Sudanese forces recovered hisColombian ID and posted it
online.
And in a separate geo-locatedvideo, another Colombian
contractor was seen firing anRSF mortar inside the El Fasher
(09:51):
theater.
Taken as a whole, theirtestimonies point to one
conclusion.
A UAE connected recruitmentpipeline that moved foreign
fighters across three countriesand deliver them directly into
the RSF ranks.
Sudan's filing before theInternational Court of Justice
ties all of this informationtogether.
(10:13):
Investigators traced weaponsused by the RSF backed to UAE
serial numbers.
They identified armored vehiclesregistered to Emirati Companies.
Financial records showed banktransfers routed through UAE
institutions moving money thatpaid for equipment transport and
fighters.
And RSF soldiers themselvesdescribed training that took
(10:34):
place on UAE funded basessupported by Emirati personnel.
Individually these details couldlook isolated, but what the ICJ
filing shows is that theyoperate in sequence; weapons,
vehicles, financing, training,all reinforcing one another as
parts of a single state backedsystem.
(10:57):
And US officials watched thewhole thing unfold.
According to Reuters, whenAmerican diplomats confronted
Emirati delegates with theintelligence; the drones, the
cargo flights, the land routes,the UAE dropped its denials.
Once the evidence was laid out,they didn't claim the shipments
were humanitarian anymore.
But even after that quietadmission, nothing meaningful
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changed.
No sanctions, no publicdesignations, no diplomatic
cost.
The supply lines kept runningand the wall around El Fasher
kept tightening.
Once you lay out the supplychain, the next question becomes
unavoidable.
Why is United Arab Emiratesdoing this?
(11:42):
Why pour drones, weapons, fuel,contractors, and money into a
militia that is torn Sudanapart?
To understand that?
You have to understand twothings, Sudan, strategic value
and the historical and politicalbreakdown that allowed foreign
powers to exert their influence.
(12:02):
Sudan is one of the mostresource rich countries in
Africa.
It's the third largest producerof gold on the continent, and
most of that gold is minedinformally, which makes it
extremely easy to smuggle.
A huge amount of it flowsstraight into Dubai.
The commercial hub of the UnitedArab Emirates and the political
authority behind that trade, thedecisions, the networks, the
(12:26):
security apparatus sits in AbuDhabi, the UAE's capital.
Dubai and Abu Dhabi are twocenters of power inside the same
state.
A small but extremely wealthygulf monarchy with outsized
influence across Africa and theMiddle East.
And it isn't just gold.
Sudan holds reserves of oil.
(12:48):
Uranium copper, iron ore, andrare minerals.
Resources that become far easierto seize, smuggle, and exploit
when the state collapses andoversight disappears.
Then there's geography.
Sudan controls more than 450miles of Red Sea coastline, one
of the most strategic shippingcorridors on Earth.
(13:11):
This is why the Emiratis hadalready invested billions in
Sudanese agriculture, land, andinfrastructure, and why in 2022,
Abu Dhabi signed a$6 billionagreement to build a deep water
port on Sudan's Coast.
Sudan's civilian governmentlater canceled that project, a
major blow to the UA E'scommercial and strategic
(13:32):
ambitions.
But strategic value alonedoesn't explain how Sudan
unraveled.
To understand how Sudan reachedthis moment you have to look at
the forces that shaped it, whothe RSF are, and what the
Sudanese people tried to buildduring the 2019 revolution.
The Rapid support forces or RSFwere created in 2013 out of the
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Janjaweed, the Arab militiasOmar al-Bashir deployed during
the Darfur genocide beginning in2003, who were responsible for
killing up to 300,000 people anddisplacing more than 2.5
million.
And because there was never anyreal accountability for those
crimes, the Janjaweed weren'tdismantled.
(14:16):
They were rebranded.
Expanded and eventuallyformalized into the RSF.
That impunity is a straight linefrom Darfur in 2003 to Darfur
Today.
In 2017, a law formalized theRSF as an independent
paramilitary force with its owncommand structure, budget, and
(14:36):
authority.
Under its Commander MohammadHamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti,
the RSF expanded rapidly seizinggoldmines in Darfur, and
building a vast cross-borderbusiness and smuggling network.
By the time of the revolution,the RSF had become one of the
most powerful armed actors inthe country, a parallel military
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with regional backing and itsown financial empire.
Then in 2019, ordinary Sudaneseled by women studentsand
neighborhood resistancecommittees rose up against Omar
Al Bashir's 30 yeardictatorship.
They forced him out in April,2019.
It was one of the most powerfulpro-democracy uprisings in the
(15:18):
region, but the military, theSudanese armed forces, or SAF,
under general Abdel Fattahal-Burhan, on one side, and the
RSF under Hemedti on the otherco-opted that revolution instead
of completing it.
They sidelined that civilianleadership and created a
military dominated transitionalgovernment.
Sudan Analyst, Shayna Lewisexplained it best to Mehdi
(15:41):
Hasan.
"The SAF and RSF are two sidesof the same coin.
This isn't a war of RSF versusSAF.
It's a war of RSF and SAFagainst the Sudanese people.
The only way they coulddismantle the revolution was to
tear the country apart, and thatshows you just how powerful that
movement really was." Thatbetrayal, that collapse of the
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democratic transition createdthe vacuum that foreign powers
rush to fill.
Iran backed to Sudanese army.
Russia through Wagner backed theRSF.
Egypt and Saudi Arabia alignedwith the military, and the
United Arab Emirates stepped indeeper than anyone with money,
weapons, drones, contractors,and logistics, all for the RSF.
(16:27):
For the UAE, the RSF solved twoproblems at once.
Strategically, they acted as acounterweight to Iran's
influence through Sudan's Army,secured Emirati access to the
Red Sea, and placed a loyalforce on key transit corridors.
Economically, they controlledthe gold, the borders, and the
smuggling routes that fed Dubaimarkets.
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And when the RSF suffered itsbiggest defeat losing Khartoum
in March, 2025, that should haveended the war.
Instead, it was the moment thatUAE increased its support.
More drones, more flights, moreweapons, more foreign
contractors, more money.
Everything we now know aboutthis conflict points in the same
(17:11):
direction.
The RSF did not sustain itself.
Its ability to keep fighting andto keep encircling cities like
El Fasher dependedoverwhelmingly on the Emiratis.
Once you see that clearly thefall of El Fasher stops looking
like the inevitable collapse ofa vulnerable city.
It begins to look like somethingelse, entirely.
(17:32):
A war shaped, financed, andsustained by a powerful US ally
with virtually no consequencesfor the role it played.
We've spent a lot of timetalking about supply chains,
drones, port deals, andgeopolitical bets.
None of that is the core of thestory.
(17:53):
The real story is about thepeople left inside that berm,
the 35 mile sand wallssurrounding El Fasher.
Inside what Yale's team nowcalled the Killbox.
In reporting by the new Arab.
A 33-year-old civil societyworker named Rashida Ishaq
describes the morning The RSFentered her neighborhood in
northern El Fasher.
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RSF fighters burst into herhome.
Within minutes, they shot heruncle dead in the living room.
Later that day, they marched herand hundreds of others under
armed guard to a public squarenear a UNICEF office.
Families were herded intomakeshift detention areas.
Men and boys were separated.
She watched as more than 20 men,both young and elderly, were
(18:35):
executed with direct shots tothe head and chest.
"They shot children in front ofus".
She said"some, not even fiveyears old".
It all unfolded,she recalled,"amid women's screams and
Children's wailing".
All the while they weredemanding money from terrified
families.
Those who could pay oftenthrough mobile banking apps had
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some chance of being released.
Those who couldn't facedexecution.
Rashida's family ended up payingroughly 25 million Sudanese
pounds, about$1,700 in goldjewelry to get out.
Even then, they had to fleealong roads still patrolled by
RSF fighters, passing elderlyand sick people collapsing along
the way.
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Her story isn't an isolatedhorror.
In the same New Arab piece.
Ahmed Ali Suleman 37 describesgetting a call that his younger
brother Shamar had been detainedat El Fasher's Northern Gate.
The captors demanded 50 millionSudanese pounds, about$3,300,
within three hours.
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Emad didn't have that much.
He begged them to accept 5million as a first payment.
They agreed.
He sent the money through amobile app from the Bank of
Khartoum.
Hours later, when he calledback, they told him"Your brother
went to heaven".
He later learned that hisbrother had been killed, along
with everyone else detained atthat spot.
This wasn't an accident or amisunderstanding.
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It was deliberate.
Families were forced to emptytheir savings, anything of
value, paying ransoms in thehope that their loved ones might
live.
Some were released, many werenot.
Survivor testimonies from theSIHA Network, the strategic
initiative for Women in the Hornof Africa fill in the larger
pattern.
(20:20):
By early November, SIHA hadverified detailed cases of
widespread rape and assault bythe RSF against women and girls
fleeing El Fasher.
along with killings, abductions,disappearances and deliberate
targeting indigenous Africancommunities like the Fur,
Masalit, and Zaghawa.
One survivor described an olderman trying to protect them from
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RS F soldiers.
They said,"you girls come thisway and told the old man to go.
He said,'I cannot leave mydaughters'.
They killed the old man.
His son was crying.
'My father.
My father', and they killed theboy too.
Then they turned to her and hersister.
They took my sister, she's 14years old.
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I said,'I will go instead of mysister.
She is sick'.
They said,'either we rape you orwe take your daughter'.
I said,'rape me, but leave mydaughter'.
So they beat me and raped me."Another woman describing her
escape on the road to Tawila,told SIHA;,"They shouted,‘You
are Zaghawa, aren’t you?’ Wetold them,'no, we are not'.
They raped me.
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They degraded us.
They tortured us.
In front of me they killed awoman.
My daughter screamed and ran."To get out.
Many were forced to pay ransomsranging from the equivalent of
$100 to$8,000.
Those who couldn't pay, arebeaten, subjected to sexual
violence or disappeared.
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SIHA is blunt about what all ofthis adds up to.
"These acts aren't random orisolated.
They reflect a coordinatedeffort of persecution and a
continuation of a two decadecampaign of extermination
against indigenous Africancommunities in Darfur".
If Rashida, Ahmed, and the SIHAtestimonials, show us what this
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looks like on the ground.
The Yale Humanitarian ResearchLab show us what it looked like
from orbit.
Satellite imagery reviewed byYale's team and cited in the New
Yorker show clusters of bodiesarranged in shapes analyst is
called C and J positions.
Those shapes aren't arbitrary.
A C shape is the way a bodyfalls when someone is shot while
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running.
A J is how a person collapseswhen they fall on their knees or
on their side as they die.
From space those bodies aresurrounded by bloodstains
visible on satellite imagery.
The kind of pigment spread youonly see when killings happen at
scale.
Nathaniel Raymond, head of theYale HRL, who has analyzed
atrocity imagery for 15 years.
(22:46):
Described what his team saw as"tens upon tens of thousands of
potential dead in five days".
Yale's analysts also identifiedmultiple execution sites, not
just scattered killings and apattern of mass violence that
matched survivor reportsexactly.
Al Jazeera's analysis of Yale'sfindings backs all of this up.
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Clusters of bodies that were notthere before the RSF entered the
city.
Pools of blood that appear onlyafter the offensive began and
the unmistakable signs of masskilling.
Based on their analysis, Raymondand his team estimate that
160,000 to 250,000 people remainin El Fasher after the siege
broke, but they are not seeingtypical patterns of life for a
(23:30):
city with that many people.
That, typically implies one ofthree things.
People are dead captured or inhiding.
In the weeks following ElFasher's fall, the Yale team
believe the RSF have entered thebody disposal phase.
Bodies are being moved, piled,burned, hidden.
(23:50):
An attempt to cover the scale ofwhat happened.
The New Yorker puts it plainly.
The only modern comparison isRwanda, where nearly a million
people were killed in just threemonths.
What the satellites are showingus is not just evidence of a
massacre.
It is evidence of something farlarger, a mass killing event
with no modern parallel outsideof a genocide UN reporting
(24:13):
confirms with the survivortestimonies and satellite
imagery have already shown.
What happened inside El Fasheris systematic ethnic cleansing,
and the scale of the killings isstaggering.
At least 2000 civilians killedin just two days, including
nearly 500 people inside theSaudi maternity hospital alone.
At the UN Security Council,humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher,
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put it this way,"women and girlsare being raped, people are
being mutilated and killed withutter impunity, we cannot hear
the screams, but as we sit heretoday, the horror is
continuing." The un fact findingmission on Sudan describes a
deliberate pattern of ethnicallytargeted executions, sexual
violence, mass forcedisplacement, and the
(24:58):
destruction of vitalinfrastructure.
And warns that as El Fasherburns in millions face
starvation, the world has tochoose between silence or
solidarity.
And SIHA after gatheringsurvivor testimonies across
Darfur, ends its report with aline that should haunt us all.
"Every moment of inaction is achoice, one that sides with the
(25:19):
perpetrators".
What makes the atrocities insideEl Fasher even harder to
comprehend is that many of themweren't discovered months later
by investigators.
They were already circulatingonline, filmed by RSF fighters
themselves.
One of the clearest examplescomes from the New Yorkers
reporting on an RSF BrigadierGeneral named Alfateh Abdullah
(25:42):
Idris, wildly known as Abu Lulu.
The day after El Fasher fell avideo spread across social
media.
Nine men sit slumped along adirt road, wrists hanging over
their knees, heads bowed.
RSF fighters stand over them.
One holds a whip.
Then another man walks intoframe with a Kalishnakov.
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It's AB Lulu.
He moves down the line andshoots each man at close range.
The last man crosses his armover his head trying to protect
himself before the bullets throwhim backward.
Other RSF fighters join infiring into the bodies.
And the reason anyone saw thisvideo is simple.
Abu Lulu posted it, openly.
(26:25):
Later, after he was brieflydetained and released, he
streamed again on TikTok.
In that livestream, he claimedhe had fulfilled a lifelong goal
killing 2000 people, and said hewas starting to count over from
zero.
Abu Lulu wasn't the only onedocumenting the violence.
The New Yorker reports that RSFfighters posted other videos
from El Fasher.
(26:46):
Shouting God is great overcorpses, flashing victory signs
with rifles raised, even forcingmen to dig their own graves.
None of this was leaked, none ofit was uncovered by accident.
It was the RSF publiclydisplaying what they were doing
inside El Fasher, confident thatno one was going to stop them.
For nearly two years, the teamat Yale's Humanitarian Research
(27:09):
Lab wasn't just documenting RSFattacks, they were warning the
world about exactly what wascoming.
According to the New Yorker andRaymond's own public statements.
HRL submitted more than 60briefings to UN officials, US
agencies, and humanitarianpartners.
Not vague alerts, detailedassessments, predicting the
(27:31):
siege, the encirclement, and thelikely outcome if the RSF ever
breached El Fasher.
And yet the response from theinternational system and from
Washington never matched thescale of the danger.
In late 2024, Raymond resignedfrom the Biden administration
over their unwillingness to acton the intelligence.
(27:52):
Not because the data wasunclear, but because the
political cost of confrontingthe UAE, A central partner in
the Abraham Accords was deemedtoo high.
Raymond has said publicly thateven minor targeted economic
pressure on Abu Dhabi couldshift the calculus, but that
pressure never came.
And so, as Raymond put it, ElFasher became the"most precisely
(28:15):
warned atrocity in modernhistory." El Fasher wasn't a
tragedy that emerged out of thinair.
It was the kind of atrocity thatworld sees coming and still
allows to happen.
And that's the part that makesthis moment so hard to sit
with..
The realization that thefailures in Sudan aren't
isolated.
(28:35):
They echo failures we'rewatching in Gaza and in so many
places around the world wherethe phrase never again has lost
its meaning.
As Nathaniel Raymond put it,"we've gone from never again to
all the dang time." For him.
That pattern leads back tosomething Frederick Douglass
wrote more than a century ago.
A truth that still explains whyatrocities continued long after
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the warnings begin.
"Power concedes nothing withouta demand".
However, he then adds somethingof his own saying that it's up
to the people to make thatdemand.
Because"when we stop engaging inthe necessary delusion that we
can do something, we becomecomplicit in what happens next."
Because the truth is atrocitiesrarely continue because the
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world is unaware.
They continue because the peoplewith the power to intervene
decide the costs are too high,and the rest of us decides
there's nothing we can do.
El Fasher forces us to confrontthat choice, not in the
abstract, not in hindsight, butright now to ask, what are we
going to demand?
(29:43):
Thanks for listening.
If this episode brought clarityto what's unfolding in Sudan,
please consider subscribing,sharing it with someone who
might care, and leaving areview.
It helps to get these storiesheard.
Until next time, stay curious,stay critical, and stay
connected.
Imagine a city of about aquarter million people, a city
roughly the size of buffalo.
Now imagine that as war spreadsacross the region, people flee
there from every direction.
Villagers escaping massacres,families carrying their
children, entire communitiesuprooted.
Over time, that city swells.
(00:23):
Half a million, then more.
By 2024 when the fightingreached its peak, more than a
million people were trappedinside its limits.
That's more people than live inSan Francisco, trapped inside a
35 mile dirt wall.
That city is El Fasher, thecapital of North Darfur, and in
(00:45):
April, 2024, the rapid supportforces began in closing it.
Satellite imagery.
The same tools used to documentmass killings elsewhere, showed
a continuous sand bermencircling the city.
It wasn't built for defense.
It was built to cut El Fasheroff.
a wall to stop food, water, andescape.
(01:08):
UN investigators, aid agencies,and journalists all warned the
same thing.
El Fasher was being prepared forsomething catastrophic.
Inside conditions collapsed.
Hospitals ran out of supplies.
Civilians went days withoutfood.
Many survived on grass andanimal feed.
(01:28):
Food meant for livestock, nothuman beings.
Crossing RSF controlled roadsmeant risking capture, assault,
or execution.
For more than 500 days, ElFasher held out.
A siege more than three timeslonger than Stalingrad, the
longest and most brutal siege ofthe 20th century.
(01:51):
And the entire time everyone inthe city understood exactly what
would happen if the RSF brokethrough the final defenses.
They had seen.
What happened in El Genina, inBarra across Darfur, inside El
Fasher.
The greatest fear wasn't death..
It was survival.
Living long enough to endurewhat happens when a militia
(02:13):
notorious for massacres andethnic killing storms a city
already starved.
On October 26th, 2025, that fearbecame reality.
El Fasher fell.
What followed wasn't chaos.
It wasn't the fog of war.
It was a continuation of apattern of atrocities that had
(02:36):
been ongoing for nearly twoyears.
One documented by survivors,human rights groups, UN
investigators and satelliteimagery, and that leads to a
harder question, one that turnsus from a local horror into a
global story.
How was the RSF able to sustainthis war at all?
(02:58):
How did a militia with nofactories, no air force and
limited logistics wage, acountrywide conflict for two
years and build a siege wallvisible from space?
To answer that, we have to lookbeyond Sudan's borders.
Because this genocide wasn'tjust executed.
It was enabled.
(03:20):
If you want to understand how ElFasher fell, how a city became a
prison, how starvation was usedas a weapon, how a genocide
unfolded in slow motion.
You have to understand onething.
The rapid support forces, orRSF, did not wage this war
alone.
That isn't speculation.
(03:40):
It's the conclusion of USintelligence.
UN investigators and every majorregional reporting effort.
And the clearest summary of thatreality comes from one of the
most experienced US officials onSudan.
Cameron Hudson, former chief ofstaff to successive of US
special envoys for Sudan.
He told the Wall Street Journal"the war would be over if not
(04:04):
for the UAE.
The only thing keeping the RSFin this war is the overwhelming
amount of military supportthey're receiving from the
Emiratis".
Everything that follows; thedrones, the ammunition, the
fuel, the vehicles, the privatemilitary contractors, flows from
that.
Because for two years,investigators have traced the
(04:26):
same pattern.
The United Arab Emirates hasbeen supplying the RSF through
regional partners.
When you start digging into howthe RSF was supplied, the trail
of evidence extends far beyondSudan.
It goes through airports, bordercrossings, and desert airstrips
scattered across East and NorthAfrica.
(04:49):
One of the earliest knownlocations was in Entebbe,
Uganda.
In June of 2023, A UAE cargoplane landed on what was
described as a humanitarianmission.
But when airport staff openedthe crates, they didn't find
medicine or food.
They found rifles andammunition.
According to workers who spoketo the Wall Street Journal.
(05:11):
After that discovery, they weretold to stop inspecting Emirati
flights altogether, and onceinspection stopped, those
flights increased.
They weren't staying in Uganda.
They were heading west towardsone of the most unlikely
logistics hubs in Africa.
Amdjarass, a small desert townin Eastern Chad.
(05:32):
Multiple investigations,Reuters, UN experts, satellite
analysts, all converge on thesame picture.
UAE planes landed in Amdjarass.
cargo, was unloaded onto thetarmac.
From there.
RSF aligned convoys carry theshipments across the desert, a
steady line of trucks movinginto Darfur.
(05:52):
Over time, Amdjarass became theAirbridge, the logistical heart
of the RSF's war.
If you travel north fromAmdjarass, you'll find a second
major route.
One that runs straight throughEastern Libya territory.
Controlled by Khalifa Haftar,one of the UAE's closest
regional partners.
For years, UN investigators havedocumented how the Emiratis
(06:14):
moved weapons into Libya tosupport Haftar's forces.
and Reuter's flight analysisshows that many of the same
airlines previously accused offerrying Emirati weapons to
Haftar in 2019 and 2020 are nowoperating in the Amdjarass
airlift.
That's the connective tissue.
Haftar's units move supplies andpersonnel across desert roads
(06:35):
into Western Sudan.
Not through improvised smugglingpaths, but through longstanding
Emirati backed networksrepurposed for a new war.
There's an Eastern corridor too.
The Wall Street Journal andReuters both tracked UAE Linked
Flights making stops in Somalia,mainly in Basaso, the Port City
in Puntland.
(06:56):
Why Basaso?
The UAE has spent yearstightening its grip there,
investing in the port, expandingsecurity ties, and operating a
military base.
This wasn't the backup route.
It was an alternate lane.
In the same system, a systemdesigned with a redundancy.
If one route became politicallysensitive, the other stayed
(07:17):
open.
That's not how a militiaoperates.
That's how a state levellogistics network functions.
And you can see that system mostclearly in the drones.
US intelligence agencies andbattlefield imagery analyzed by
the journal confirmed that theRSF began operating Chinese made
Rainbow Series drones, includingthe CH 95.
(07:40):
These drones fly for 24 hours,conduct long range surveillance
and fire precision weapons.
And here's the detail thatmatters.
Only China and the UAE possessthese drones.
And China isn't taking sides inSudan.
So if the RSF is flying CH 95'sover North Darfur.
(08:01):
They didn't come from Beijing,they came from UAE.
The Yale Humanitarian ResearchLab even spotted aircraft
matching their profile in theskies above El Fasher during RSF
operations.
It wasn't just drones movingthrough these routes.
Investigators also tracedEuropean made components into
the RSF arsenal, includingSerbian made mortars and British
(08:24):
made vehicle engines movingthrough the same Emirati
networks that previously armedmilitias in Libya.
According to the New Yorker,some of these shipments crossed
the Chad border disguised ashumanitarian aid, while others
were air freighted through a UAEbase in Somalia, the very routes
already tied to Emirati cargoflights.
Then there's a Colombiancontractor story, the clearest
(08:47):
sign of how far this networkextends.
In late 2024, the Colombianoutlet, La Silla Vacia, revealed
that hundreds of retiredColombian soldiers had been
recruited through a UAE linkedprivate military company with
promises of oil refinerysecurity jobs.
But once they arrived in UAE,everything changed.
(09:09):
They were flown to Benghazi,Libian forces aligned with
Khalifa haftar confiscated theirpassports, held them in
barracks, and eventually pushedthem in convoys across the
desert.
By early 2025, close to 380 ofthem had been moved into Sudan,
many assigned to train RSFfighters, including teenagers,
(09:29):
while others were pulleddirectly into combat.
One contractor Christian Lombanahad his leg crushed during a
desert ambush.
Sudanese forces recovered hisColombian ID and posted it
online.
And in a separate geo-locatedvideo, another Colombian
contractor was seen firing anRSF mortar inside the El Fasher
(09:51):
theater.
Taken as a whole, theirtestimonies point to one
conclusion.
A UAE connected recruitmentpipeline that moved foreign
fighters across three countriesand deliver them directly into
the RSF ranks.
Sudan's filing before theInternational Court of Justice
ties all of this informationtogether.
(10:13):
Investigators traced weaponsused by the RSF backed to UAE
serial numbers.
They identified armored vehiclesregistered to Emirati Companies.
Financial records showed banktransfers routed through UAE
institutions moving money thatpaid for equipment transport and
fighters.
And RSF soldiers themselvesdescribed training that took
(10:34):
place on UAE funded basessupported by Emirati personnel.
Individually these details couldlook isolated, but what the ICJ
filing shows is that theyoperate in sequence; weapons,
vehicles, financing, training,all reinforcing one another as
parts of a single state backedsystem.
(10:57):
And US officials watched thewhole thing unfold.
According to Reuters, whenAmerican diplomats confronted
Emirati delegates with theintelligence; the drones, the
cargo flights, the land routes,the UAE dropped its denials.
Once the evidence was laid out,they didn't claim the shipments
were humanitarian anymore.
But even after that quietadmission, nothing meaningful
(11:20):
changed.
No sanctions, no publicdesignations, no diplomatic
cost.
The supply lines kept runningand the wall around El Fasher
kept tightening.
Once you lay out the supplychain, the next question becomes
unavoidable.
Why is United Arab Emiratesdoing this?
(11:42):
Why pour drones, weapons, fuel,contractors, and money into a
militia that is torn Sudanapart?
To understand that?
You have to understand twothings, Sudan, strategic value
and the historical and politicalbreakdown that allowed foreign
powers to exert their influence.
(12:02):
Sudan is one of the mostresource rich countries in
Africa.
It's the third largest producerof gold on the continent, and
most of that gold is minedinformally, which makes it
extremely easy to smuggle.
A huge amount of it flowsstraight into Dubai.
The commercial hub of the UnitedArab Emirates and the political
authority behind that trade, thedecisions, the networks, the
(12:26):
security apparatus sits in AbuDhabi, the UAE's capital.
Dubai and Abu Dhabi are twocenters of power inside the same
state.
A small but extremely wealthygulf monarchy with outsized
influence across Africa and theMiddle East.
And it isn't just gold.
Sudan holds reserves of oil.
(12:48):
Uranium copper, iron ore, andrare minerals.
Resources that become far easierto seize, smuggle, and exploit
when the state collapses andoversight disappears.
Then there's geography.
Sudan controls more than 450miles of Red Sea coastline, one
of the most strategic shippingcorridors on Earth.
(13:11):
This is why the Emiratis hadalready invested billions in
Sudanese agriculture, land, andinfrastructure, and why in 2022,
Abu Dhabi signed a$6 billionagreement to build a deep water
port on Sudan's Coast.
Sudan's civilian governmentlater canceled that project, a
major blow to the UA E'scommercial and strategic
(13:32):
ambitions.
But strategic value alonedoesn't explain how Sudan
unraveled.
To understand how Sudan reachedthis moment you have to look at
the forces that shaped it, whothe RSF are, and what the
Sudanese people tried to buildduring the 2019 revolution.
The Rapid support forces or RSFwere created in 2013 out of the
(13:55):
Janjaweed, the Arab militiasOmar al-Bashir deployed during
the Darfur genocide beginning in2003, who were responsible for
killing up to 300,000 people anddisplacing more than 2.5
million.
And because there was never anyreal accountability for those
crimes, the Janjaweed weren'tdismantled.
(14:16):
They were rebranded.
Expanded and eventuallyformalized into the RSF.
That impunity is a straight linefrom Darfur in 2003 to Darfur
Today.
In 2017, a law formalized theRSF as an independent
paramilitary force with its owncommand structure, budget, and
(14:36):
authority.
Under its Commander MohammadHamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti,
the RSF expanded rapidly seizinggoldmines in Darfur, and
building a vast cross-borderbusiness and smuggling network.
By the time of the revolution,the RSF had become one of the
most powerful armed actors inthe country, a parallel military
(14:58):
with regional backing and itsown financial empire.
Then in 2019, ordinary Sudaneseled by women studentsand
neighborhood resistancecommittees rose up against Omar
Al Bashir's 30 yeardictatorship.
They forced him out in April,2019.
It was one of the most powerfulpro-democracy uprisings in the
(15:18):
region, but the military, theSudanese armed forces, or SAF,
under general Abdel Fattahal-Burhan, on one side, and the
RSF under Hemedti on the otherco-opted that revolution instead
of completing it.
They sidelined that civilianleadership and created a
military dominated transitionalgovernment.
Sudan Analyst, Shayna Lewisexplained it best to Mehdi
(15:41):
Hasan.
"The SAF and RSF are two sidesof the same coin.
This isn't a war of RSF versusSAF.
It's a war of RSF and SAFagainst the Sudanese people.
The only way they coulddismantle the revolution was to
tear the country apart, and thatshows you just how powerful that
movement really was." Thatbetrayal, that collapse of the
(16:03):
democratic transition createdthe vacuum that foreign powers
rush to fill.
Iran backed to Sudanese army.
Russia through Wagner backed theRSF.
Egypt and Saudi Arabia alignedwith the military, and the
United Arab Emirates stepped indeeper than anyone with money,
weapons, drones, contractors,and logistics, all for the RSF.
(16:27):
For the UAE, the RSF solved twoproblems at once.
Strategically, they acted as acounterweight to Iran's
influence through Sudan's Army,secured Emirati access to the
Red Sea, and placed a loyalforce on key transit corridors.
Economically, they controlledthe gold, the borders, and the
smuggling routes that fed Dubaimarkets.
(16:48):
And when the RSF suffered itsbiggest defeat losing Khartoum
in March, 2025, that should haveended the war.
Instead, it was the moment thatUAE increased its support.
More drones, more flights, moreweapons, more foreign
contractors, more money.
Everything we now know aboutthis conflict points in the same
(17:11):
direction.
The RSF did not sustain itself.
Its ability to keep fighting andto keep encircling cities like
El Fasher dependedoverwhelmingly on the Emiratis.
Once you see that clearly thefall of El Fasher stops looking
like the inevitable collapse ofa vulnerable city.
It begins to look like somethingelse, entirely.
(17:32):
A war shaped, financed, andsustained by a powerful US ally
with virtually no consequencesfor the role it played.
We've spent a lot of timetalking about supply chains,
drones, port deals, andgeopolitical bets.
None of that is the core of thestory.
(17:53):
The real story is about thepeople left inside that berm,
the 35 mile sand wallssurrounding El Fasher.
Inside what Yale's team nowcalled the Killbox.
In reporting by the new Arab.
A 33-year-old civil societyworker named Rashida Ishaq
describes the morning The RSFentered her neighborhood in
northern El Fasher.
(18:13):
RSF fighters burst into herhome.
Within minutes, they shot heruncle dead in the living room.
Later that day, they marched herand hundreds of others under
armed guard to a public squarenear a UNICEF office.
Families were herded intomakeshift detention areas.
Men and boys were separated.
She watched as more than 20 men,both young and elderly, were
(18:35):
executed with direct shots tothe head and chest.
"They shot children in front ofus".
She said"some, not even fiveyears old".
It all unfolded,she recalled,"amid women's screams and
Children's wailing".
All the while they weredemanding money from terrified
families.
Those who could pay oftenthrough mobile banking apps had
(18:56):
some chance of being released.
Those who couldn't facedexecution.
Rashida's family ended up payingroughly 25 million Sudanese
pounds, about$1,700 in goldjewelry to get out.
Even then, they had to fleealong roads still patrolled by
RSF fighters, passing elderlyand sick people collapsing along
the way.
(19:17):
Her story isn't an isolatedhorror.
In the same New Arab piece.
Ahmed Ali Suleman 37 describesgetting a call that his younger
brother Shamar had been detainedat El Fasher's Northern Gate.
The captors demanded 50 millionSudanese pounds, about$3,300,
within three hours.
(19:37):
Emad didn't have that much.
He begged them to accept 5million as a first payment.
They agreed.
He sent the money through amobile app from the Bank of
Khartoum.
Hours later, when he calledback, they told him"Your brother
went to heaven".
He later learned that hisbrother had been killed, along
with everyone else detained atthat spot.
This wasn't an accident or amisunderstanding.
(19:59):
It was deliberate.
Families were forced to emptytheir savings, anything of
value, paying ransoms in thehope that their loved ones might
live.
Some were released, many werenot.
Survivor testimonies from theSIHA Network, the strategic
initiative for Women in the Hornof Africa fill in the larger
pattern.
(20:20):
By early November, SIHA hadverified detailed cases of
widespread rape and assault bythe RSF against women and girls
fleeing El Fasher.
along with killings, abductions,disappearances and deliberate
targeting indigenous Africancommunities like the Fur,
Masalit, and Zaghawa.
One survivor described an olderman trying to protect them from
(20:41):
RS F soldiers.
They said,"you girls come thisway and told the old man to go.
He said,'I cannot leave mydaughters'.
They killed the old man.
His son was crying.
'My father.
My father', and they killed theboy too.
Then they turned to her and hersister.
They took my sister, she's 14years old.
(21:01):
I said,'I will go instead of mysister.
She is sick'.
They said,'either we rape you orwe take your daughter'.
I said,'rape me, but leave mydaughter'.
So they beat me and raped me."Another woman describing her
escape on the road to Tawila,told SIHA;,"They shouted,‘You
are Zaghawa, aren’t you?’ Wetold them,'no, we are not'.
They raped me.
(21:22):
They degraded us.
They tortured us.
In front of me they killed awoman.
My daughter screamed and ran."To get out.
Many were forced to pay ransomsranging from the equivalent of
$100 to$8,000.
Those who couldn't pay, arebeaten, subjected to sexual
violence or disappeared.
(21:42):
SIHA is blunt about what all ofthis adds up to.
"These acts aren't random orisolated.
They reflect a coordinatedeffort of persecution and a
continuation of a two decadecampaign of extermination
against indigenous Africancommunities in Darfur".
If Rashida, Ahmed, and the SIHAtestimonials, show us what this
(22:03):
looks like on the ground.
The Yale Humanitarian ResearchLab show us what it looked like
from orbit.
Satellite imagery reviewed byYale's team and cited in the New
Yorker show clusters of bodiesarranged in shapes analyst is
called C and J positions.
Those shapes aren't arbitrary.
A C shape is the way a bodyfalls when someone is shot while
(22:25):
running.
A J is how a person collapseswhen they fall on their knees or
on their side as they die.
From space those bodies aresurrounded by bloodstains
visible on satellite imagery.
The kind of pigment spread youonly see when killings happen at
scale.
Nathaniel Raymond, head of theYale HRL, who has analyzed
atrocity imagery for 15 years.
(22:46):
Described what his team saw as"tens upon tens of thousands of
potential dead in five days".
Yale's analysts also identifiedmultiple execution sites, not
just scattered killings and apattern of mass violence that
matched survivor reportsexactly.
Al Jazeera's analysis of Yale'sfindings backs all of this up.
(23:07):
Clusters of bodies that were notthere before the RSF entered the
city.
Pools of blood that appear onlyafter the offensive began and
the unmistakable signs of masskilling.
Based on their analysis, Raymondand his team estimate that
160,000 to 250,000 people remainin El Fasher after the siege
broke, but they are not seeingtypical patterns of life for a
(23:30):
city with that many people.
That, typically implies one ofthree things.
People are dead captured or inhiding.
In the weeks following ElFasher's fall, the Yale team
believe the RSF have entered thebody disposal phase.
Bodies are being moved, piled,burned, hidden.
(23:50):
An attempt to cover the scale ofwhat happened.
The New Yorker puts it plainly.
The only modern comparison isRwanda, where nearly a million
people were killed in just threemonths.
What the satellites are showingus is not just evidence of a
massacre.
It is evidence of something farlarger, a mass killing event
with no modern parallel outsideof a genocide UN reporting
(24:13):
confirms with the survivortestimonies and satellite
imagery have already shown.
What happened inside El Fasheris systematic ethnic cleansing,
and the scale of the killings isstaggering.
At least 2000 civilians killedin just two days, including
nearly 500 people inside theSaudi maternity hospital alone.
At the UN Security Council,humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher,
(24:36):
put it this way,"women and girlsare being raped, people are
being mutilated and killed withutter impunity, we cannot hear
the screams, but as we sit heretoday, the horror is
continuing." The un fact findingmission on Sudan describes a
deliberate pattern of ethnicallytargeted executions, sexual
violence, mass forcedisplacement, and the
(24:58):
destruction of vitalinfrastructure.
And warns that as El Fasherburns in millions face
starvation, the world has tochoose between silence or
solidarity.
And SIHA after gatheringsurvivor testimonies across
Darfur, ends its report with aline that should haunt us all.
"Every moment of inaction is achoice, one that sides with the
(25:19):
perpetrators".
What makes the atrocities insideEl Fasher even harder to
comprehend is that many of themweren't discovered months later
by investigators.
They were already circulatingonline, filmed by RSF fighters
themselves.
One of the clearest examplescomes from the New Yorkers
reporting on an RSF BrigadierGeneral named Alfateh Abdullah
(25:42):
Idris, wildly known as Abu Lulu.
The day after El Fasher fell avideo spread across social
media.
Nine men sit slumped along adirt road, wrists hanging over
their knees, heads bowed.
RSF fighters stand over them.
One holds a whip.
Then another man walks intoframe with a Kalishnakov.
(26:03):
It's AB Lulu.
He moves down the line andshoots each man at close range.
The last man crosses his armover his head trying to protect
himself before the bullets throwhim backward.
Other RSF fighters join infiring into the bodies.
And the reason anyone saw thisvideo is simple.
Abu Lulu posted it, openly.
(26:25):
Later, after he was brieflydetained and released, he
streamed again on TikTok.
In that livestream, he claimedhe had fulfilled a lifelong goal
killing 2000 people, and said hewas starting to count over from
zero.
Abu Lulu wasn't the only onedocumenting the violence.
The New Yorker reports that RSFfighters posted other videos
from El Fasher.
(26:46):
Shouting God is great overcorpses, flashing victory signs
with rifles raised, even forcingmen to dig their own graves.
None of this was leaked, none ofit was uncovered by accident.
It was the RSF publiclydisplaying what they were doing
inside El Fasher, confident thatno one was going to stop them.
For nearly two years, the teamat Yale's Humanitarian Research
(27:09):
Lab wasn't just documenting RSFattacks, they were warning the
world about exactly what wascoming.
According to the New Yorker andRaymond's own public statements.
HRL submitted more than 60briefings to UN officials, US
agencies, and humanitarianpartners.
Not vague alerts, detailedassessments, predicting the
(27:31):
siege, the encirclement, and thelikely outcome if the RSF ever
breached El Fasher.
And yet the response from theinternational system and from
Washington never matched thescale of the danger.
In late 2024, Raymond resignedfrom the Biden administration
over their unwillingness to acton the intelligence.
(27:52):
Not because the data wasunclear, but because the
political cost of confrontingthe UAE, A central partner in
the Abraham Accords was deemedtoo high.
Raymond has said publicly thateven minor targeted economic
pressure on Abu Dhabi couldshift the calculus, but that
pressure never came.
And so, as Raymond put it, ElFasher became the"most precisely
(28:15):
warned atrocity in modernhistory." El Fasher wasn't a
tragedy that emerged out of thinair.
It was the kind of atrocity thatworld sees coming and still
allows to happen.
And that's the part that makesthis moment so hard to sit
with..
The realization that thefailures in Sudan aren't
isolated.
(28:35):
They echo failures we'rewatching in Gaza and in so many
places around the world wherethe phrase never again has lost
its meaning.
As Nathaniel Raymond put it,"we've gone from never again to
all the dang time." For him.
That pattern leads back tosomething Frederick Douglass
wrote more than a century ago.
A truth that still explains whyatrocities continued long after
(28:57):
the warnings begin.
"Power concedes nothing withouta demand".
However, he then adds somethingof his own saying that it's up
to the people to make thatdemand.
Because"when we stop engaging inthe necessary delusion that we
can do something, we becomecomplicit in what happens next."
Because the truth is atrocitiesrarely continue because the
(29:19):
world is unaware.
They continue because the peoplewith the power to intervene
decide the costs are too high,and the rest of us decides
there's nothing we can do.
El Fasher forces us to confrontthat choice, not in the
abstract, not in hindsight, butright now to ask, what are we
going to demand?
(29:43):
Thanks for listening.
If this episode brought clarityto what's unfolding in Sudan,
please consider subscribing,sharing it with someone who
might care, and leaving areview.
It helps to get these storiesheard.
Until next time, stay curious,stay critical, and stay
connected.
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The Burden
The Burden is a documentary series that takes listeners into the hidden places where justice is done (and undone). It dives deep into the lives of heroes and villains. And it focuses a spotlight on those who triumph even when the odds are against them. Season 5 - The Burden: Death & Deceit in Alliance On April Fools Day 1999, 26-year-old Yvonne Layne was found murdered in her Alliance, Ohio home. David Thorne, her ex-boyfriend and father of one of her children, was instantly a suspect. Another young man admitted to the murder, and David breathed a sigh of relief, until the confessed murderer fingered David; “He paid me to do it.” David was sentenced to life without parole. Two decades later, Pulitzer winner and podcast host, Maggie Freleng (Bone Valley Season 3: Graves County, Wrongful Conviction, Suave) launched a “live” investigation into David's conviction alongside Jason Baldwin (himself wrongfully convicted as a member of the West Memphis Three). Maggie had come to believe that the entire investigation of David was botched by the tiny local police department, or worse, covered up the real killer. Was Maggie correct? Was David’s claim of innocence credible? In Death and Deceit in Alliance, Maggie recounts the case that launched her career, and ultimately, “broke” her.” The results will shock the listener and reduce Maggie to tears and self-doubt. This is not your typical wrongful conviction story. In fact, it turns the genre on its head. It asks the question: What if our champions are foolish? Season 4 - The Burden: Get the Money and Run “Trying to murder my father, this was the thing that put me on the path.” That’s Joe Loya and that path was bank robbery. Bank, bank, bank, bank, bank. In season 4 of The Burden: Get the Money and Run, we hear from Joe who was once the most prolific bank robber in Southern California, and beyond. He used disguises, body doubles, proxies. He leaped over counters, grabbed the money and ran. Even as the FBI was closing in. It was a showdown between a daring bank robber, and a patient FBI agent. Joe was no ordinary bank robber. He was bright, articulate, charismatic, and driven by a dark rage that he summoned up at will. In seven episodes, Joe tells all: the what, the how… and the why. Including why he tried to murder his father. Season 3 - The Burden: Avenger Miriam Lewin is one of Argentina’s leading journalists today. At 19 years old, she was kidnapped off the streets of Buenos Aires for her political activism and thrown into a concentration camp. Thousands of her fellow inmates were executed, tossed alive from a cargo plane into the ocean. Miriam, along with a handful of others, will survive the camp. Then as a journalist, she will wage a decades long campaign to bring her tormentors to justice. Avenger is about one woman’s triumphant battle against unbelievable odds to survive torture, claim justice for the crimes done against her and others like her, and change the future of her country. Season 2 - The Burden: Empire on Blood Empire on Blood is set in the Bronx, NY, in the early 90s, when two young drug dealers ruled an intersection known as “The Corner on Blood.” The boss, Calvin Buari, lived large. He and a protege swore they would build an empire on blood. Then the relationship frayed and the protege accused Calvin of a double homicide which he claimed he didn’t do. But did he? Award-winning journalist Steve Fishman spent seven years to answer that question. This is the story of one man’s last chance to overturn his life sentence. He may prevail, but someone’s gotta pay. The Burden: Empire on Blood is the director’s cut of the true crime classic which reached #1 on the charts when it was first released half a dozen years ago. Season 1 - The Burden In the 1990s, Detective Louis N. Scarcella was legendary. In a city overrun by violent crime, he cracked the toughest cases and put away the worst criminals. “The Hulk” was his nickname. Then the story changed. Scarcella ran into a group of convicted murderers who all say they are innocent. They turned themselves into jailhouse-lawyers and in prison founded a lway firm. When they realized Scarcella helped put many of them away, they set their sights on taking him down. And with the help of a NY Times reporter they have a chance. For years, Scarcella insisted he did nothing wrong. But that’s all he’d say. Until we tracked Scarcella to a sauna in a Russian bathhouse, where he started to talk..and talk and talk. “The guilty have gone free,” he whispered. And then agreed to take us into the belly of the beast. Welcome to The Burden.