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darfur
UN Describes 'Crime Scene' in el-Fasher, Sudan After Gaining Access to War-Torn City
UN officials said they were "still very concerned about those who are injured, who we didn’t see, those who may be detained."
Dec 30, 2025
After weeks of pushing for access to el-Fasher, the city in Sudan's Darfur region that was taken over by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in October, United Nations officials reported on Tuesday that their recent visit to the city showed evidence of a "crime scene," with the few people remaining there showing signs of trauma from the mass atrocities they suffered and witnessed.
UN humanitarian workers gained access to the city last Friday, two months after the government-aligned Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) lost control of el-Fasher to the United Arab Emirates-backed RSF.
The city was the SAF's last major stronghold in Darfur, and fighting has now escalated in the Kordofan region.
Reuters reported that the RSF has attempted to portray el-Fasher as "back to normal" since its takeover, even as the Yale Humanitan Research Lab published a report earlier this month on the mass killings that the paramilitary group have sought hide evidence of "through burial, burning, and removal of human remains on a mass scale."
Denise Brown, the UN resident and humanitarian coordinator for Sudan, told Reuters that the few people remaining in el-Fasher are living in empty buildings or tents made of plastic sheets. A small market was operating, but was selling only locally grown vegetables.
"The town was not teeming with people," Brown said. "There were very few people that [we] were able to see... We have photos of people, and you can see clearly on their faces the accumulation of fatigue, of stress, of anxiety, of loss."
Healthcare staff were seen at Saudi Hospital in el-Fasher, where 460 people were killed in an RSF attack, but they were working without medical supplies, Brown said.
Yale's report earlier this month relied partially in satellite imagery taken between October 26-November 28, which showed clusters of what researchers said were consistent with human remains in and around el-Fasher. More than 70% of the clusters had become smaller in satellite images by late November, and 38% were no longer visible.
The researchers said the RSF has used particular patterns of killing, including murdering people as they flee attacks, door-to-door and execution-style killings, and mass killings at detention centers and military installations.
Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab, said the UN's discovery of few signs of life in el-Fasher corroborated the lab's findings.
Brown said the UN team is "still very concerned about those who are injured, who we didn’t see, those who may be detained," and told Reuters the officials plan to return to assess water and sanitation access.
About 100,000 people fled el-Fasher in October, and about three-quarters of those forced to leave the city were already internally displaced people who had fled violence as many as three or more times. In total 1.17 million el-Fasher residents have been displaced.
Earlier this month, Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), released a short documentary detailing the experiences of people who left the city and are sheltering in Chad.
"They call it Paris, and now it is destroyed," a man named Noor told MSF of el-Fasher. "In the past it was a good city with all its lights on."
An estimated 30.4 Sudanese people are now in need of humanitarian assistance, and on Monday the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) reported unprecedented levels of child malnutrition in the Um Baru locality in northern Darfur.
More than half of children there are suffering from acute malnutrition, and 1 in 6 are severely, acutely malnourished—a condition that could kill them within weeks if left untreated.
“When severe acute malnutrition reaches this level, time becomes the most critical factor,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell. “Children in Um Baru are fighting for their lives and need immediate help. Every day without safe and unhindered access increases the risk of children growing weaker and more death and suffering from causes that are entirely preventable.”
Many of the families observed by UNICEF fled el-Fasher in recent weeks.
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ICC Collecting War Crimes Evidence Against Sudanese Militia After Darfur Massacre
The court said the actions of Sudan's Rapid Support Forces, who are backed by a US ally in the UAE, "may constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity."
Nov 04, 2025
The International Criminal Court said it is collecting and preserving evidence of war crimes in Sudan's Darfur region following a massacre committed by a militia group and amid reports of widespread starvation.
In a statement published Monday, the ICC—the international body charged with prosecuting crimes against humanity—expressed "profound alarm and deepest concern over recent reports emerging from El-Fasher about mass killings, rapes, and other crimes" allegedly committed by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which breached the city last week.
According to the Sudan Doctors Network (SDN), a medical organization monitoring the country's brutal civil war, the militants slaughtered more than 1,500 people in just three days after capturing El-Fasher, among them more than 460 people who were systematically shot at the city's Saudi Maternity Hospital.
The ICC said that "such acts, if substantiated, may constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute," the court's founding treaty, which lays out the definitions for acts including genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
The court said it was "taking immediate steps regarding the alleged crimes in El-Fasher to preserve and collect relevant evidence for its use in future prosecutions."
The announcement comes shortly following a new report from the UN-affiliated Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the world's leading authority on hunger crises, which found that famine has been detected in El-Fasher and the town of Kadugli in Sudan's South Kordofan province. Twenty other localities in the two provinces—which have seen some of the civil war's worst fighting—are also in danger of famine, according to the report.
The two areas have suffered under siege from the RSF paramilitary, which has cut off access to food, water, and medical care. The IPC says it has led to the "total collapse of livelihoods, starvation, extremely high levels of malnutrition and death."
According to the UN's migration authority, nearly 37,000 people have been forced to flee cities across North Kordofan between October 26 and 31. They joined more than 650,000 displaced people who were already taking refuge in North Darfur's city of Tawila.
Sudan's civil war, which began in 2023, has created the world's largest humanitarian crisis, with potentially as many as 150,000 people killed since it began. Over 12 million people have been displaced, and 30.4 million people, over half of Sudan’s total population, are in need of humanitarian support.
The recent escalation of the crisis has led to heightened global scrutiny of RSF's chief financier, the United Arab Emirates. In recent days, US politicians and activists have called for the Trump administration to halt military assistance to the Gulf state, which it sold $1.4 billion in military aircraft in May.
On Tuesday, Emirati diplomats admitted for the first time that they "made a mistake" supporting the RSF as it attempted to undermine Sudan's transitional democratic government, which took power in 2019 after over three decades of rule by the Islamist-aligned dictator Omar al-Bashir. Those efforts culminated in a military coup in 2021 and an eventual power struggle for control over the country.
However, as Sudanese journalist Nesrine Malik wrote in The Guardian on Monday, the UAE "continues to deny its role, despite overwhelming evidence."
"The UAE secures a foothold in a large, strategic, resource-rich country, and already receives the majority of gold mined in RSF-controlled areas," Malik wrote. "Other actors have been drawn in, overlaying proxy agendas on a domestic conflict. The result is deadlock, quagmire, and blood loss that seems impossible to stem, even as the crisis unravels in full view."
"Sudan’s war is described as forgotten, but in reality it is tolerated and relegated," she continued. "Because to reckon with the horror in Sudan... is to see the growing imperialist role of some Gulf powers in Africa and beyond—and to acknowledge the fact that no meaningful pressure is applied to these powers, including the UAE, to cease and desist from supporting a genocidal militia because the UK, US, and others are close allies with these states."
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After Horrific Massacres in Sudan, Lawmakers Call for US to Stop Funding 'Arms Dealers' in UAE
"We must do everything in our power to stop this genocide, including cutting off all weapons sales to the United Arab Emirates," said Rep. Rashida Tlaib.
Oct 30, 2025
After Sudan's Rapid Support Forces overran the city of el-Fasher this week, committing a series of horrific war crimes, lawmakers are calling for the US to pull its financial support for the United Arab Emirates, which is accused of providing extensive financial, military, and political support to the paramilitary group.
The Sudan Doctors Network (SDN), a medical organization monitoring the country's brutal civil war, said Wednesday that RSF militants, who are fighting against Sudan's government, killed more than 1,500 people over just three days after capturing the city, where more than 1 million people have languished under siege for more than 17 months. Sudan's armed forces say the death toll is as high as 2,000.
Among those killed, according to the World Health Organization, are more than 460 people systematically slaughtered at el-Fasher's Saudi Maternity Hospital. In what the SDN called "a heinous crime that violates all humanitarian laws and divine principles," they said RSF members "cold-bloodedly killed everyone they found inside the Saudi Hospital, including patients, their companions, and anyone else present in the wards."
One gruesome video, filmed by an RSF militant and obtained by Al Jazeera, shows a fighter walking across a floor strewn with dead bodies. When a living patient rises up from the pile, the soldier immediately guns them down.
The bloodshed in el-Fasher is so widespread and severe that Yale's Humanitarian Research Lab has been able to identify patches of bloodstained sand from space using satellite imagery.
The SDN has described the massacres as part of a “deliberate and systematic campaign of killing and extermination,” which began over a year and a half ago, when more than 14,000 civilians were killed in the region through “bombing, starvation, and extrajudicial executions.”
Death estimates for Sudan's civil war, which began in 2023, vary widely. But one former US envoy has estimated that over 150,000 people have been killed, while 12 million people have been displaced, and 30.4 million people, over half of Sudan’s total population, are in need of humanitarian support.
International human rights groups from Human Rights Watch to Amnesty International have agreed that the RSF’s actions throughout the conflict have amounted to an ethnic cleansing campaign against Sudan’s non-Arab ethnic groups, most notably the Masalit, who have historically called Darfur home and who were victims of a previous extermination campaign during the 2000s at the hands of RSF’s predecessor, the Janjaweed.
In January 2025—in the waning days of the Biden administration—then-US Secretary of State Antony Blinken joined the world consensus after months of reported hesitation. He stated that the RSF "committed genocide in Sudan," citing the fact that they "targeted fleeing civilians, [murdered] innocent people escaping conflict, and prevented remaining civilians from accessing lifesaving supplies."
The State Department also sanctioned seven companies in the UAE, which has been the RSF's primary overseas supporter and funder, but notably declined to sanction its government, which a New York Times investigation had revealed the previous year was "funneling money, weapons and, now, powerful drones to the RSF."
As Jon Rainwater, the executive director of Peace Action, noted in Common Dreams this past May: "What makes this all the more alarming is that the UAE is one of America's closest military partners—and a major recipient of US arms. Despite repeated assurances to Washington that it would not arm Sudan's belligerents, the UAE has continued these transfers, as confirmed by the Biden administration in one of its last acts as well as by members of Congress."
He also noted that US President Donald Trump and his family have personally cultivated "deep financial ties" to the UAE, which "has invested $2 billion in a Trump family crypto venture." Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) pointed out that the investment has singlehandedly catapulted Trump's currency to "one of the five largest stablecoins in the world, massively inflating the president's wealth."
Over the past month—while negotiating a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas—Trump has had friendly meetings with the UAE’s leaders where he has openly boasted about their financial entanglements. As he grasped the hand of Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE's deputy prime minister, Trump joked about how the oil-rich nation has "unlimited cash."
Even as warnings have piled up about an impending slaughter if the RSF took el-Fasher, journalist Oscar Rickett wrote in Middle East Eye that the dangers "were ignored as the UAE's 'unlimited cash' spoke louder."
While the Trump administration has continued the Biden-era sanctions on UAE-based companies and Secretary of State Marco Rubio has maintained the position that RSF is committing a genocide, the administration has only strengthened its economic and military relationship with the Gulf state's government.
Over objections from some Democrats, Trump's State Department in May authorized the sale of $1.4 billion in military aircraft to the UAE, which it rushed through without subjecting it to congressional review.
A group of Democrats—including Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the Africa Subcommittee—said in a joint resolution that the "end-run around Congress is irresponsible and will further embolden the UAE to... continue its support for the RSF and the killing of innocent civilians."
After news broke of the RSF's latest series of atrocities in el-Fasher, Murphy renewed his criticism of US arms sales under both the Trump and Biden administrations.
"Why is the US allowing the UAE—which we fund militarily—[to] help the brutal RSF engage in mass atrocity?" he asked on social media. "This isn't just about Trump—the Biden administration was letting this happen too."
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) urged Congress to pass a bill he introduced in March, which would halt US weapons shipments to the UAE until it stops materially supporting the militia group.
Among the strongest critics are congresspeople who have also called for the US to cease its military and financial support for Israel amid its genocide in Gaza.
"Sudan is facing the world's worst humanitarian crisis and a genocide," said Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). "The UAE and other arms dealers to the RSF and RSF-aligned militias must be held accountable."
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) added: "We must do everything in our power to stop this genocide, including cutting off all weapons sales to the United Arab Emirates, who are arming and funding this ethnic cleansing."
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