Amnesty report: RSF committed crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing during El Fasher siege

Amnesty International said in a report published Tuesday that the Rapid Support Forces committed crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing during the siege and capture of El Fasher, the capital of Sudan’s North Darfur state, documenting mass killings, starvation, sexual violence and attacks on medical facilities during a campaign to seize the city. The report, titled “City Under Siege, Children Under Fire: Rapid Support Forces’ Crimes Against Humanity in North Darfur,” covers abuses from early 2024 through October 2025 and adds to mounting evidence of large-scale atrocities in one of the conflict’s most consequential battles.

Amnesty said it based its findings on interviews with 247 people, including 208 survivors — 169 adults and 39 children — as well as a review of 89 videos and satellite imagery. The rights group said the material documented abuses in El Fasher and surrounding areas over more than a year, during which the RSF tightened control around the city and then overran it. Agnès Callamard, Amnesty’s secretary general, said: “The war in Sudan is a war on civilians. The world was warned of the horrors that civilians in El Fasher confronted as the RSF laid siege to the city. It is a stain on the conscience of humanity.”

According to Amnesty, the RSF maintained a siege of El Fasher from about May 2024 through October 2025, restricting food and humanitarian supplies and contributing to famine and acute malnutrition. The group said the RSF launched its final offensive on Oct. 26, 2025, and that survivors described executions near a network of berms around the city, mass graves and large numbers of dead. Amnesty also said it documented attacks on medical facilities, including the Saudi Maternity Hospital, noting that attacks on protected medical sites can constitute a war crime. It said the investigation found large-scale sexual violence, unlawful detention, hostage-taking for ransom, and the recruitment and use of boys, including abducted children. Former detainees described conditions at the Mina al-Bari detention center on the eastern outskirts of El Fasher, Amnesty said, including confinement in shipping containers, extreme heat, lack of food and water, and deaths in custody.

Amnesty said its evidence supported a finding, “without qualification,” of persecution based on ethnic identity, and that the documented acts “may be relevant to the crime of genocide.” That is Amnesty’s legal assessment, not a court ruling. The group named RSF commanders it said were implicated in abuses, including Al-Fateh Abdullah Idris, also known as Abu Lulu, Major Gen. Gedo Hamdan Ahmed Mohamed, also known as Abu Shouk, and Lt. Col. Abbas Khater Bakhit. Amnesty said it sent a letter to RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo on June 10, 2026, and had not received a response by the time of publication. It called for an immediate nationwide ceasefire and for an independent, adequately resourced international force to protect civilians.

Other authoritative investigations have pointed in the same direction. The U.N. human rights office said in February 2026 that it had documented more than 6,000 killings in the first three days after El Fasher fell in late October 2025 and said the real toll was likely significantly higher. U.N. reporting cited fact-finding mission findings that “the Rapid Support Forces carried out large-scale and systematic attacks on civilians.” Separately, Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab published satellite analysis consistent with systematic mass killings and body disposal in and around El Fasher after the city’s fall.

El Fasher was the main Darfur state capital not under RSF control after Sudan’s war began on April 15, 2023, making it both strategically and symbolically important. The RSF traces its roots to the Janjaweed militias linked to earlier atrocities in Darfur, giving fresh allegations of ethnic targeting in the city particular weight. For accountability, the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s office has said it is preserving evidence and investigating alleged crimes in Darfur, where the court has jurisdiction through a 2005 U.N. Security Council referral. In February 2026, the U.N. Security Council’s 1591 Sudan sanctions committee also added four RSF commanders to its sanctions list, including Gedo Hamdan Ahmed and Al-Fateh Abdullah Idris.