Briefing Room 07.11.25: Massacre in El-Fasher

Welcome back to The Briefing Room, the weekly show where we look at what conflict news is trending on social media and then say, no, come over here and look at this deep.

This week, two big stories flying stealthily under the radar were the potential return of total energies to war-dorn Cabo Delgado in Mozambique, and the growing tensions between Jerusalem and Ankara over a potential Turkish peacekeeping deployment in post-war Gaza.

Before that, though, we're diving into a story that should have been front-page news everywhere but has been shamefully underreported.

The genocidal mass killings that swept the city of Al-Fasha in Sudan. As always, thank you for your support. Your subscriptions help us not only fund these bonus videos for you, but also help continue our mission of providing undiased analysis of all the world's conflicts over on our main channel.

So thank you again, and now let's get to Al-Fasha. Mass killings in Al-Fasha. The siege of Al-Fasha is over, and the genocide of Al-Fasha, well, that's underway.

Right now, the situation in the Darfur region of Sudan couldn't be worse, as more and more evidence emerges to suggest that Sudan's paramilitary rapid support forces have engaged in the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians.

Quoting Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab, Based on UN figures and what we can see on the ground in Al-Fasha, Sudan, more people could have died in ten days than have died in the past two years of the war in Gaza. For perspective here, as of the time of writing, the death toll in Gaza stands at 68,875.

In the days that immediately followed the Emirates-backed RSF's takeover of Al-Fasha, the satellite imagery in circulation on social media depicted bloodstains large enough to be seen from space, suggesting mass killings on a scale beyond compare, at least since comparable open-source satellite imagery first started to become available.

Now, however, the most recent satellite photos show something very different, the early indicators of the construction of mass graves. How deep those graves are, how many bodies, how many layers of bodies they're intended to hold, nobody knows for sure, but the RSF is digging, and their intent is obvious.

Over the last several days, video and photo evidence from the conflict zone has indicated numerous extrajudicial executions of civilians, sometimes one by one, and sometimes in the dozens at once.

Much of that evidence was captured and posted by RSF fighters themselves, who seem to have absolutely no qualms about sharing documentation of their atrocities despite their organization's attempts to deny that any mass killings are taking place.

Footage taken by people driving in and out of Al-Fasha shows the corpses of apparent civilians lining the road, especially concentrated at and around a massive sand berm that the RSF had been building for months.

That berm now encircles the city, and has made it all the easier for the RSF to slaughter those who've tried to escape. According to the IPC, 20 other locations in the Darfur and Kordofan regions are at imminent risk of famine, especially in places where the fighting is at its most intense.

For perspective, the IPC has only declared a state of famine five times this decade.

Once in Somalia, twice in South Sudan. and one other time this year in the Gaza Strip. As the IPC and a range of other humanitarian groups have tried to emphasize, the famines facing Sudan right now are not an accident. They are manufactured, leveraged as a weapon of war in ways that are no less deliberate than the RSF's siege of Al-Fasha.

Across the country, some 14 million people have been displaced, sanitation infrastructure has been ruined and diseases spreading across massive populations of hungry, weakening people with very limited ability to withstand it.

Now the RSF appears to be adjusting its strategy to try and hide the evidence of atrocities committed in Al-Fasha while pivoting toward discussions of peace. On Thursday, 6th November, the RSF agreed to a ceasefire proposal offered by the United States which calls for the, quote, urgent delivery of humanitarian assistance to all Sudanese people.

The ceasefire is highly unlikely to go through, seeing as it includes provisions about territorial control and withdrawals that are thought to be mutually unacceptable for both the RSF and the Sudanese regime. But that may not be the point.

The RSF is reliant on the support of the United Arab Emirates, which has been more than happy to continue funneling arms to the RSF despite its other wartime atrocities until this point, while relying on flimsy denials of the RSF's well-documented conduct.

Now, however, international attention may have grown to a level that the Emirates and the RSF didn't want to sustain, making it an ideal moment for the RSF to signal that they're at least open to the idea of peace. Possibly just to blame the Sudanese armed forces if that peace ultimately doesn't happen.

Those newly observed mass graves in Al-Fasha may serve a similar purpose, to allow the group to hide evidence of its atrocities in the city by the time that international aid journalists, organizations, peacekeepers, and other outsiders may be allowed in.

For the RSF and the Emirates, ceasefire talks would most likely serve a second purpose, to clear the way for either a formal or informal partition of the country outright. The RSF has made clear it desires control over the Darfur region, control that, at this point, is basically established.

Neither the RSF nor the Sudanese armed forces have the strength to defeat each other outright, especially with the Emirates providing the RSF with continued support.

Now, with the scale and horror of the RSF's genocidal assault on Al-Fasha, international mediators may be willing to do whatever it takes in order to stop the violence. If the RSF wants de facto control of half the country, then perhaps for those mediators, that's an acceptable price to pay.

Whether the RSF would actually stop its genocide in that case, well, that's another story.

Why Israel Doesn't Want Turkish Soldiers in Gaza The ceasefire in the Gaza Strip remains as shaky as ever, but at least for now, as of the time of writing, it appears as if that ceasefire can hold.

With the worst of the violence on pause, international mediators led by the United States are intent on constructing a security force that can deploy Middle Eastern or global troops into the Gaza Strip.

Their goal would be to serve as a long-term stabilizing force on the territory, and according to Washington, it's the nation and troops of Turkey that should take center stage.

Israel, however, value of a threat. that's... strongly disagrees. And the reason why might be the only thing left that Turkey and Israel can agree on. By the judgment of both nations, Ankara and Jerusalem have entered into a regional standoff, and they're building a rivalry that might shape to be the next Cold War in the Middle East.

In this part of the world, quiet rivalries that could be defined as a Cold War are relatively common. Israel's already been embroiled in more than its fair share, both in the proxy conflicts and assassination campaigns of its long stare-down with Iran and in the older rivalry between itself and the semi-unified Arab world.

And we say semi-unified because the Arab world has had plenty of its own Cold conflicts, including a period from the 1950s to the 1970s widely referred to as the Arab Cold War, pitting pan-Arab nationalist leaders against conservative religious monarchies.

And of course, we couldn't leave out the long-simmering proxy rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia, also a growing rivalry between Saudi Arabia and its next-door neighbor, the United Arab Emirates, or, indeed, the rivalry between most of the Gulf states on one side and the nation of Qatar on the other.

Long story short, the Middle East is really complicated, isn't it? But right now, the balance of power across the Middle East is shifting faster than ever.

Iran and its proxy allies have been drastically diminished. The Emirates are focused on geopolitical projects in Africa. That's a polite way of saying fueling a genocide in Sudan.

And Saudi Arabia has sought to position itself in a delicate balance between global power players like the US and China, while trying to keep itself away from conflicts and engagements with other nations. Israel and Turkey, however, are both on the rise.

Israel because it's essentially dismantled the Iran-backed network of threats that it's faced for decades.

And Turkey because of its growing military strength, its strategic use of its position on the global diplomatic stage, and its success in winding down its conflict with the regional Kurdish population.

Both Israel and Turkey are under the control of highly ambitious leaders, Netanyahu, Erdogan, respectively, each of whom have managed to stake out a complex but influential position as they relate to other regional and global powers.

And right now, both Turkey and Israel are very aware of each other's presence, separated by just the country of Syria on land and a little corner of the Mediterranean by sea.

Historically, Israel and Turkey have had a mostly positive relationship. They're both relative black sheep in the landscape of the Middle East, as they both share strong strategic connections to the United States and NATO.

But the ties between the two capitals have been deteriorating for over a decade now, and they've been made all the worse by Israel's war in Gaza and its peripheral conflicts with Iran, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.

Turkey has accused Israel of trying to start a regional war, decried Israel as a terrorist state, and unilaterally ended its diplomatic relations with Jerusalem, while Israel has accused Turkey of meddling in Syria and treating Israel hypocritically given its own conduct in Syria, Cyprus, and against Kurds on its own soil.

Recently, Turkey has been putting in considerable effort to beef up its military capabilities and become directly competitive with Israel, purchasing dozens of new and used Eurofighter jets, renewing it. bid for American F-35s and accelerating its process to build and procure its own fifth-generation fighter, the Khan, in order to match Israel's vaunted

Airstrike capabilities.

It's also working hard to create a multi-layered, AI-enabled air defense system referred to domestically as the Steel Dome, in order to provide direct or near-direct parity with the missile defense systems that Israel relies on.

And as the nation of Syria finds its feet in its own post-Sahad era, the country has become ground zero for an open, Cold War-style influence competition between Jerusalem and Ankara.

So, with all that context in mind, it should probably be no surprise that Israel has demonstrated its staunch opposition to the idea that Turkish troops could be deployed in Gaza, both because of the implications of allowing Turkish troops en masse onto an Israel-controlled territory, and because of the optics of Jerusalem receiving security support from

Ankara.

Israel reportedly fears that Turkey may also try to help Hamas survive, and even convert it to a Turkish proxy force, rather than an Iranian one.

Turkey, of course, is pushing hard for the deployments, and has worked to make itself a leading influence in negotiations over Gaza's future, in hopes that it can become the conduit for nations like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and others to help create a new post-war reality.

Although other nations haven't yet agreed on the makeup of a multinational Gaza force, Qatar, Turkey, Egypt, the Emirates, and Azerbaijan are each considering the possibility. Total Energies returns to a war-torn Cabo Delgado.

Is it a good idea? And for our final story today, let's turn our attention to Mozambique, specifically to the northern province of Cabo Delgado, where French energy giant Total Energies is getting ready to restart a key natural gas extraction project after a four-year force majeure pause.

A spokesperson said the company had written to the Mozambican government to express interest in lifting force majeure, but they insisted that this would only happen if the government approved an updated timeline and budget about $4.5 billion higher than previous estimates.

The restart has Maputo's full support, with Bloomberg noting that the government wanted work to resume as quickly as possible because the project is just seen as vital to reviving the nation's economy. The project is so important that news of its restart caused a 2.9% spike in the price of Mozambique's eurobond.

So it should come as no surprise that, as several sources told French outlet Le Monde, work on the project has already resumed, and that all the statements and letters are, at best, formalities rather than a genuine attempt at negotiation.

Okay, so you might now be wondering, what does this have to do with anything, Simon? This is the briefing room, not the international finance room, isn't it? We're here for hard-hitting geopolitics, foreign policy analysis, and war stories, not business analysis.

And to that I say, well, you're absolutely right on all fronts, aren't you? Fronts. Ha ha.

All right. So, here's what we're not telling you. In our introduction, we mentioned force majeure.

That's a clause that allows companies to suspect. end contractual obligations when extraordinary circumstances beyond their control make it impossible to continue operations. For Total Energies, that extraordinary circumstance was an attack on Parma as a town on Mozambique's coast that had become a hub for workers and contractors servicing the gas project.

Now, the attack was carried out by a local insurgent group linked to the Islamic State that had been wreaking havoc in Mozambique since back in 2017.

Now, look, we did a deep dive on the insurgency and the attack on Parma over on the YouTube channel, but all you need to know for this video is that the insurgents had made targeting the natural gas project a key part of their plans, and when they attacked, the government was caught embarrassingly flat-footed.

More than 1,100 civilians died in the Battle of Parma in what was an embarrassing failure for the government.

Although it did at least lead to greater international attention on the conflict, the Southern African Development Community, or SADC, and Rwanda sent in troops, which, while effective in curbing the worst of the insurgency, haven't eliminated it entirely.

In fact, the insurgency recently flared up again, with ACLED reporting multiple attacks from August up to, well, actually, up to right now. On the 14th of October, the insurgents killed a security guard working on a natural gas project.

On the 21st, they ambushed a police convoy, killing the driver of the lead police vehicle, who they hit with a rocket-propelled grenade.

We chose these two attacks to highlight two really important facts about the group.

One, they still appear interested in the LNG project, and two, while their forces may have been diminished by Mozambique and its international partners, the group still does maintain the technical knowledge, the weaponry, and the confidence to successfully go and attack a police convoy.

Now, with all of that in mind, we have to ask a rather uncomfortable question.

Is restarting this project right now really a good idea, guys. Because you see, here's the thing. There's a very real fear that bringing Total Energies back could actually make the security situation a whole lot worse, not better.

Andrew Bergrand, who's a senior policy advisor at Oxfam America, told Bloomberg, and we'll just quote him here, right now, people are living in fear. Folks in Katanda, police officers, contractors, they don't see how this project can work if people are concerned about security. And look, the government and Total Energies, they know that this danger exists.

For Total Energies, they have insisted that the project can only happen if Rwanda, and not Mozambique, is in charge of security. Patrick Piane, the company's CEO, in a speech to the French Senate said, and we'll quote him here, Mozambique has a long history, but not a great army.

That's basically an acknowledgement that relying on Mozambique for your security is like asking girl guides to, I don't know, secure the f***ing Helmand province or something.

Mapuso, on the other hand, continues to insist that even though the insurgents are still active, Cabo Delgado is safe enough for the project to resume. Mozambican President Daniel Chapo, in an interview with Bloomberg earlier this year, said, quoting McGinn, regarding security, it's relatively stable compared to the past four years.

If we're waiting for Cabo Delgado... to be a heaven, we won't live force majeure.

Now, from a purely pragmatic point of view, we can see why both parties are behaving like this. As we mentioned, this project is vital for Mozambique's economy and also for Total Energies. They are a multinational corporation with, you know, commitments to shareholders and investors and stuff like that.

Still, this doesn't justify creating a massive target for the insurgents to attack in an attempt to prove that they're still as powerful as they once were. Beyond the risk of a direct attack on the facility, there's also the possibility that the project could trigger a wave of resentment from the locals.

They might see all the security measures the facility receives compared to how little the government has invested in keeping them safe, as evidence of a two-tiered security system that prioritizes foreign economic interests over the security of the average Mozambican.

And that, for a group of people who believe Maputo is already marginalizing them, could push people into the waiting arms of the Islamic State. Now, look, we're not predicting that people are going to flock to the terrorists. We've seen what happens around the world whenever people feel that their government doesn't care about them.

The opposition, no matter how violent it might be, starts sounding more and more reasonable, doesn't it? And that is a risk that Mozambique really can't afford. Thank you.