UN Probe: RSF’s Campaign in El Fasher Amounts to Genocide, Leaving Civilians Trapped Between Starvation and Rape
A U.N. Fact‑Finding Mission has concluded that Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces committed acts in El Fasher that amount to genocide, documenting mass killings, systematic rape, abductions and the deliberate use of starvation. The findings turn one city’s horror into a test of whether the world will treat RSF control of territory as a humanitarian crisis or a crime scene.
In El Fasher, the choice for many civilians was not between war and peace but between hunger, rape, and execution. A new report by the U.N. Fact‑Finding Mission for Sudan concludes that the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and allied militias carried out a campaign in and around the city that amounts to genocide, describing a pattern of mass killings, systematic sexual violence, abductions and starvation tactics aimed at a specific group.
Investigators say survivors described being raped in rooms where the bodies of recently killed civilians lay nearby, underscoring how sexual violence and killing were used together as tools of terror and control. The report details abductions, including of women and children, and the destruction and looting of food supplies in ways that left targeted communities dependent on RSF gatekeepers simply to eat. Taken as a whole, the mission concludes, these acts were not random byproducts of chaos but components of a coordinated campaign designed to destroy a group “in whole or in part,” the legal threshold for genocide.
The RSF, which grew out of the Janjaweed militias accused of atrocities in Darfur in the early 2000s, has been fighting Sudan’s regular army for control of key cities and regions since 2023. In El Fasher, the U.N. report says, RSF units and aligned militias encircled neighborhoods, imposed blockades that cut off humanitarian aid, and used both starvation and sexual violence to force displacement and submission. The mission’s mandate allowed it to collect testimony from survivors and analyze satellite imagery and other data, though investigators were constrained by limited access and ongoing insecurity.
For civilians in El Fasher, the findings will come as a grim validation of what they have lived through: homes torched or seized, markets emptied, men taken away or killed, and women subjected to gang rape and forced marriage under threat of death. The use of starvation as a weapon means that even those who avoided direct physical violence have been pulled into a system where access to food and medicine depends on navigating checkpoints run by the same forces accused of genocide.
Humanitarian organizations now face a sharper dilemma. Working in RSF‑controlled areas becomes not only a question of security but of legal and ethical exposure: delivering aid may mean negotiating with an actor formally accused by the U.N. of genocidal conduct, while staying away leaves besieged civilians without lifelines. Aid agencies have already warned that El Fasher is a hub for displacement across Darfur; the report’s findings suggest that those fleeing may be carrying with them not only trauma but legal claims that extend far beyond Sudan’s borders.
Strategically, the U.N. conclusion raises the stakes for regional powers that have backed or tolerated the RSF as a counterweight to Sudan’s army or as a partner in cross‑border trade and security arrangements. Countries providing weapons, funding, or diplomatic cover to the RSF now face the prospect that their support could be scrutinized as aiding a force accused of genocide. For the Sudanese army, the report bolsters its argument that it is fighting a criminal militia, but it does not absolve the military of abuses elsewhere in the country, which are the subject of separate investigations.
The designation of genocide is not simply a legal label; it is a political and moral test for the international system. It obliges U.N. member states to confront whether they are willing to use sanctions, arms embargoes, or even international prosecutions against RSF commanders while a civil war is still underway. It also challenges regional organizations, from the African Union to the Arab League, to decide whether RSF representatives can continue to sit at negotiating tables as if they were just another faction.
The shareable reality is harsh: El Fasher is not merely a battlefield; it is, in the U.N.’s assessment, a crime scene where hunger has been turned into a weapon and women’s bodies into a message. The next key signals will be whether the U.N. Security Council takes up the report in a formal session, whether any states move to refer RSF leaders to the International Criminal Court, and how aid agencies adjust their presence in RSF‑held areas as they weigh the risk of enabling a force now branded by the U.N. as genocidal.
Sources
- OSINT