What happened
Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group “committed crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing” during its 2024-25 campaign to capture the city of el-Fasher in North Darfur, Amnesty International said in a report Wednesday. “The RSF’s crimes included murder, forcible transfer, imprisonment, torture, rape, sexual slavery, other forms of sexual violence, enslavement, extermination and persecution.”
Who said what
Amnesty analyzed video and documentary evidence and interviewed 246 people for its report, including 208 survivors, 39 of whom were children. The report “accused the RSF of deliberately targeting children,” The Guardian said.
The public was “warned of the horrors that civilians in el-Fasher confronted as the RSF laid siege to the city,” said Amnesty International Secretary-General Agnès Callamard. The resulting atrocities are a “stain on the conscience of humanity.” A United Nations fact-finding mission said in February the RSF’s el-Fasher siege bore the “hallmarks of genocide” against non-Arab communities.
What next?
Sudan’s “ongoing civil war” between the army and RSF has “killed hundreds of thousands of people” and displaced more than 14 million, the BBC said. A “nationwide ceasefire” is “immediately needed” in Sudan, said Amnesty. There must also be an “independent and adequately resourced international force” assigned to “protect civilians against crimes by all parties to the conflict.”
Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces is charged with committing war crimes in North Darfur
