The Sudanese paramilitary Fast Assist Forces (RSF) carried out conflict crimes and a potential crime towards humanity in its takeover of Sudan’s western metropolis of el-Fasher final yr, the United Nations human rights workplace has stated.
In a report (PDF) launched on Friday, the Workplace of the UN Excessive Commissioner for Human Rights stated “there are affordable grounds to imagine” the RSF and allied armed teams dedicated acts amounting to conflict crimes.
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These acts embody homicide, intentional assaults towards civilians, sexual violence comparable to rape, torture, and using hunger as a weapon of conflict, the report discovered.
“If dedicated as a part of a widespread or systematic assault directed towards any civilian inhabitants, these acts can also quantity to against the law towards humanity,” it stated.
The RSF seized control of el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, on October 26, 2025, after the withdrawal of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), which have been preventing the paramilitary group for management of Sudan since April 2023.
The takeover got here after an 18-month siege that lower el-Fasher off from meals, drugs and different vital provides and prompted warnings of mass hunger.
Tens of hundreds of residents fled the town after the RSF took management, in response to UN figures, with many describing widespread violence on their journeys out of el-Fasher. Human rights advocates and other experts also warned that mass killings had taken place.
‘Like a horror film’
Friday’s report, which the UN stated was based mostly on interviews with greater than 140 victims and witnesses, described the mass killing of a whole lot of individuals at an El Fasher College dormitory known as Al-Rashid.
In accordance with survivors of the assault, RSF fighters besieged the constructing, which had been sheltering about 1,000 civilians, and opened hearth with “heavy weapons”, the report discovered. About 500 individuals have been killed, and plenty of others have been wounded.
“One witness described how our bodies have been thrown into the air by the pressure of the assault, ‘like a scene out of a horror film’,” the UN rights workplace stated.
The report additionally documented a number of situations of abstract executions, with survivors and witnesses describing how the RSF killed civilians accused of collaborating with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and allied teams.
In a single case, on October 26, a witness reported seeing RSF fighters spherical up about 300 younger males in el-Fasher’s Daraja Oula neighbourhood earlier than dividing them into teams of 30.
“The RSF fighters then opened hearth on every group till there was now not any motion, lobbed grenades at some teams, and deployed a fuel burner towards others, systematically executing all of those who had been detained,” the report stated.
The RSF and its supporters initially tried to downplay the atrocities dedicated in el-Fasher, accusing allied armed teams of being accountable. The group’s chief, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, often known as Hemedti, has additionally promised an investigation.
UN requires probe
Volker Turk, the UN human rights chief, on Friday known as for “credible and neutral investigations” into what occurred in el-Fasher.
“These should result in significant accountability for perpetrators of exceptionally critical crimes, by all obtainable means,” stated Turk, together with in Sudanese courts, third states, or on the Worldwide Prison Courtroom or different mechanisms.
Turk additionally known as on all events to the battle in Sudan to finish human rights violations and on third nations “with affect” to take motion to stop additional atrocities.
“This contains respecting the arms embargo already in place, and ending the availability, sale or switch of arms or army materials to the events,” he stated.
Lethal violence has continued in a number of areas of Sudan, with a Sudanese docs’ group saying this week that at least two children have been killed in an RSF drone assault on a mosque in North Kordofan state.
Sudan has accused the United Arab Emirates of offering army and monetary help to the RSF, an allegation that Abu Dhabi has vehemently denied.
