UN experts say destruction by Sudan's rebels in el-Fasher in October bears 'hallmarks of genocide'

U.N. officials say several thousand civilians were killed in the RSF takeover of el-Fasher, the Sudanese army's only remaining stronghold in the Darfur. Only 40% of the city's 260,000 residents managed to flee the onslaught alive, thousands of whom were wounded, the officials said. The fate of the rest remains unknown.

A brutal war

Sudan plunged into conflict in mid-April 2023, when long-simmering tensions between its military and paramilitary leaders broke out in the capital of Khartoum and spread to other regions, including Darfur. So far, the war has killed more than 40,000 people, according to U.N. figures, but aid groups say the true number could be many times higher.

The RSF overran el-Fasher last October and rampaged through the city in an offensive marked by widespread atrocities that included mass killings, sexual violence, torture and abductions for ransom, according to the U.N. Human Rights Office.

They killed more than 6,000 people between Oct. 25 and Oct. 27, the office said. Ahead of the attack, the paramilitary forces ran riot in the Abu Shouk displacement camp, just outside el-Fasher, and killed at least 300 people in two days, it said.

The RSF did not respond to an e-mailed request for comment. The group's commander, Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, has previously acknowledged abuses by his fighters, but disputed the scale of atrocities.

The United States on Thursday sanctioned three RSF commanders for their actions in el-Fasher, and called on the group to commit to an immediate ceasefire, the U.S. Treasury Department said.

"We will not tolerate this ongoing campaign of terror and senseless killing in Sudan," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement. "Without a swift end, Sudan's civil war risks further destabilizing the region, creating conditions for terrorist groups to grow and threaten the safety and interests of the United States."

At least 3 criteria for genocide were met, rights team says

The U.N. report cited a systematic pattern of ethnically targeted killings, sexual violence and destruction and public statements explicitly calling for the elimination of non-Arab communities.

An international convention known colloquially as the "Genocide Convention" — adopted in 1948, three years after the end of World War II and the Holocaust — sets out five criteria to assess whether genocide has taken place. They include killing or seriously harming members of a group, preventing births or forcibly transferring children from the group, and inflicting measures to bring about the "physical destruction" of the group.

The fact-finding team said it found at least three of those five were met: Killing members of a protected ethnic group; causing serious bodily and mental harm; and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group's physical destruction in whole or in part.

Under the convention, a genocide determination could be made even if only one of the five were met. The United Nations says a determination of genocide must be made by an international tribunal.

'Not random' excesses of war, team says

The head of the fact-finding team, Mohamed Chande Othman, a former chief justice of Tanzania, said the RSF operations were not "random excesses of war" but a planned and organized operation that bore the characteristics of genocide.

El-Fasher's residents were "physically exhausted, malnourished, and in part unable to flee, leaving them defenseless against the extreme violence that followed," the team's report said. "Thousands of persons, particularly the Zaghawa, were killed, raped or disappeared during three days of absolute horror."

The report documented cases of survivors quoting RSF fighters as saying things like: "Is there anyone Zaghawa among you? If we find Zaghawa, we will kill them all" and "We want to eliminate anything black from Darfur."

It also pointed to "selective targeting" of Zaghawa and Fur women and girls, "while women perceived as Arab were often spared."

Mona Rishmawi, a member of the fact-finding team, told a news conference in Geneva on Thursday that the team's conclusion was based on evidence of mass killings, patterns of ethnic targeting and statements by perpetrators expressing intent to eliminate and destroy the targeted communities.

"We reached the point of genocide now," Rishmawi told reporters, adding that her team expects the parties in Sudan's war to get the message that "enough is enough."

At a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Sudan later Thursday, U.N. political chief Rosemary DiCarlo said that the "horrific events" in el-Fasher "were preventable."

While el-Fasher was under siege, she said U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk repeatedly warned of the risk of mass atrocities, "but the warnings were not heeded."

Türk has now also alerted the global community to the possibility of similar crimes in Sudan's Kordofan region, where the military and the RSF are fighting, DiCarlo said, urging action now to prevent a repeat of atrocities.

British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper called the report's findings "truly horrific" and took them to the Security Council, saying she wanted to "ensure that the voices of women of Sudan who have endured so much are heard by the world."

"Today's report describes the most unimaginable and chilling horrors," she said, citing the case of a woman asked by an RSF soldier how far she was in her pregnancy. "When she responded seven months, he fired seven bullets into her abdomen killing her," Cooper told the council.

"This is the worst humanitarian crisis of the 21st Century, a war that has left 33 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, 14 million people forced to flee their homes, famine stalking millions of malnourished children," Cooper said.

A call for accountability

The fact-finding team was created in 2023 by the Geneva-based Human Rights Council, the U.N.'s leading human rights body, which has 47 member nations.

The team called for accountability for perpetrators and warned that protection of civilians is needed "more than ever" because the conflict is expanding to other regions in Sudan.

Warring parties on both sides have been accused of violating international law. But most of the atrocities have been blamed on the RSF: The Biden administration, in one of its last decisions, said the paramilitary force committed genocide in Darfur.

U.N. experts and rights groups say the RSF has had the backing of the United Arab Emirates over the course of the war, allegations that the UAE denies.

The RSF grew out of the Janjaweed militias, notorious for atrocities they committed in the early 2000s in a ruthless campaign in Darfur that killed some 300,000 people and drove 2.7 million from their homes. Sudan's former autocratic ruler Omar al-Bashir is still sought by the International Criminal Court for genocide and other crimes committed at that time.