Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) carried out mass killings, abductions of women and girls, mass gang rapes, and forced starvation in a city they besieged and captured last year as part of an intentional policy amounting to genocide, a United Nations probe found.
The RSF, which is battling the Sudanese army in a civil war, committed these crimes in al-Fashir in north Darfur after a long siege. Survivors described being raped in rooms where the bodies of recently killed civilians, including their own family members, were still lying on the ground.
The report found that the RSF and its allies committed the war crime of starvation by imposing a prolonged siege on the city, impeding relief supplies, and shelling food production systems. The RSF has denied such abuses throughout the civil war, claiming the accounts are manufactured by adversaries.
The U.N. human rights chief warned that a similar catastrophe is unfolding around another large city, al-Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan state. His office has documented patterns of summary executions, abductions, torture, and sexual violence in the surrounding region. Members of the U.N. Human Rights Council condemned the violence and established an urgent inquiry into the alleged abuses there.
