UN Sudan probe finds ‘hallmarks of genocide’ in El-Fasher

Submission statement: A fact-finding mission of the UN that visited the Sudanese city of El-Fasher three months after its capture by the rebel Rapid Support Forces (RSF) assesses that the paramilitary forces has carried out acts of genocide against the city's population.

El-Fasher is the capital of North Darfur and was besieged for 18 months by the RSF, who seized the city on October 28, 2025, and carried out one of the worst massacres of civilians in recent history. The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab considered that of the 250,000 people who were in the city when it fell to the RSF, only half of them were accounted for as refugees in other places and that the city was now devoid of civilian life, while British MPs have been briefed by experts that at least 60,000 people had been massacred by the RSF in the weeks following El-Fasher's fall.

The UN's mission based its reports on hundreds of interviews and document authentications conducted in Sudan, South Sudan and Chad, concluding that the RSF conducted widespread, systematic killings, tortures, rapes, abductions and disappearances, singularly targeting the Zaghawas, a non-Arab community living in Darfur.

The RSF are an anti-Islamist, Arab supremacist paramilitary force descended from the infamous Janjaweed who carried out the Darfur genocide in the 2000s, and were integrated to the Sudanese Armed Forces until they rebelled in April 2023, igniting the deadly civil war in Sudan. They have now seized the vast majority of Darfur and parts of southern Sudan and have carried out massacres, enslavement and ethnic cleansing against non-Arab groups in the territories under their rule, leading them to be designated as a genocidal faction by the Biden administration in January 2025.

Far from being isolated, the RSF benefit from financial and material support by the United Arab Emirates, Chad, the Libyan secessionist government of Khalifa Haftar, the Central African Republic, and Ethiopia, where a secret training camp hosting thousands of RSF fighters was discovered by a Reuters investigation last week.