Sudanese refugee women wait to collect water after waiting three days in Adre, Chad on Thursday.Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
A powerful paramilitary force has committed genocidal acts in Sudan, orchestrating a wave of systematic killings and sexual violence devised to eliminate entire ethnic groups, a United Nations mission has found.
The fact-finding mission found evidence of horrific genocidal crimes – including ethnically targeted massacres and deliberate starvation – by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), formerly known as the Janjaweed, which has been battling Sudan’s military since the outbreak of war in 2023.
The killings and sexual assaults by the RSF are considered genocidal because they were intended to destroy, in whole or in part, the Zaghawa and Fur ethnic communities in El Fasher, the capital of the North Darfur region, the UN mission concluded.
The largely Arab militia captured the city in late October after laying siege to it for 18 months, cutting off food and water supplies and bombarding it with artillery and drones.
A separate report last week by another team of UN investigators found that the RSF massacred more than 6,000 people in a three-day killing spree after seizing control of El Fasher.
After massacres in Darfur, another Sudan region faces famine and siege
The death toll might be much higher. The U.S. government, which imposed sanctions on three RSF commanders Thursday for atrocities in El Fasher, said the paramilitary force had “engaged in a systematic campaign to destroy evidence of its mass killings by burying, burning, and disposing of tens of thousands of bodies.”
The city once had a population of more than a million and still held an estimated 260,000 people when the RSF captured it. Tens of thousands are still missing, the U.S. Treasury Department said in its sanctions announcement, which accused the RSF of “war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.”
The latest UN report is based on interviews with 320 witnesses and survivors of the RSF assault on El Fasher, along with dozens of documents and 25 verified videos.
The report noted that the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Sudanese leaders in 2009 for alleged genocide in Darfur two decades ago. The latest atrocities were a “renewed” genocide against the same targeted groups, it said.
For more than a year before the killings, in detailed reports to the UN Security Council and elsewhere, world leaders had heard grim warnings of looming massacres in El Fasher – yet nothing was done.
“From mid‑2024, the risk of mass atrocity crimes was repeatedly and explicitly identified,” the UN report said. “Despite these warnings, no effective measures were taken by any party to protect the civilian population.”
The atrocities were not “random excesses of war” but rather were carefully planned and executed, deliberately co-ordinated on a large scale and approved by the RSF’s leadership, according to the UN mission’s chairperson, Mohamed Chande Othman.
“They formed part of a planned and organized operation that bears the defining characteristics of genocide,” he said in a statement Thursday.
The lengthy siege of El Fasher was calculated to bring about the destruction of the city’s people, the mission found. The siege left the city’s inhabitants “physically weakened, malnourished, traumatized and in part unable to flee, leaving them defenceless against the extreme level of violence that ensued,” the mission said in its 19-page report.
The mass killings were accompanied by racial taunts from RSF fighters, often calling the victims “slaves” and vowing to kill them all, which left no doubt that the violence was ethnically targeted, it said.
Some of the most horrifying attacks were aimed at women. The report documented one incident in which RSF troops gang raped at least 19 women in rooms filled with corpses, including the remains of their own husbands.
The Zaghawa community was particularly targeted. “By killing or removing men and systematically assaulting women and girls, the Rapid Support Forces attacked the very fabric of the group, undermining its survival,” the report said.
Human-rights groups and investigative reports have identified the United Arab Emirates as the RSF’s main funder and weapons supplier, although the UAE has repeatedly denied this.
British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said she will take the latest UN report to the Security Council “so that the world cannot look away.”
The same “international energy” that led to a ceasefire in Gaza must now be applied to push for a ceasefire in Sudan, she told journalists Thursday. “The world is still failing the people of Sudan.”