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sudan
UN Experts Find 'Hallmarks of Genocide' in Sudan's War-Torn Darfur
Their report detailed the Rapid Support Forces' "systematic pattern of ethnically targeted killings, sexual violence, destruction, and public statements explicitly calling for the elimination of non-Arab communities."
Feb 19, 2026
Independent United Nations human rights experts released a report Thursday detailing allegedly genocidal crimes committed by Sudanese rebels during an October offensive in Darfur, where thousands of people were killed and others tortured, raped, and starved during the capture of el-Fasher.
The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan report, titled Hallmarks of Genocide in el-Fasher, found that "genocidal intent is the only reasonable inference that can be drawn" from the Rapid Support Forces' (RSF) "systematic pattern of ethnically targeted killings, sexual violence, destruction, and public statements explicitly calling for the elimination of non-Arab communities, particularly the Zaghawa and Fur."
According to the mission's report, RSF—a United Arab Emirates-backed paramilitary force that originated from the Janjaweed militias used by the Sudanese government during the previous 2003-05 Darfur genocide—committed at least three genocidal acts as defined by the Genocide Convention: “killing members of a protected ethnic group, causing serious bodily and mental harm, and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction in whole or in part.”
“The scale, coordination, and public endorsement of the operation by senior RSF leadership demonstrate that the crimes committed in and around el-Fasher were not random excesses of war,” said Mohamed Chande Othman, who chaired the expert panel. "They formed part of a planned and organized operation that bears the defining characteristics of genocide.”
A devastating report by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan, finding that the 18-month starvation siege & subsequent atrocities during the fall of El-Fasher genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.www.ohchr.org/sites/defaul...
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— Tom Dannenbaum (@tomdannenbaum.bsky.social) February 19, 2026 at 7:19 AM
The experts' investigation focused on events in and around el-Fasher—the capital of North Darfur—as RSF militants fought to take the area last October following an 18-month siege that deprived civilians of food, water, medical supplies, and humanitarian aid. The report says the siege “systematically weakened the targeted population through starvation, deprivation, trauma, and confinement."
The RSF captured el-Fasher last October 26. Its fighters ran roughshod over the city and its inhabitants, committing widespread atrocities including mass murder and summary executions, torture, rape, and kidnapping for ransom, according to the UN Human Rights Office, which said that more than 6,000 people were killed over a two-day period.
“We want to eliminate anything Black from Darfur," one RSF fighter allegedly told residents, according to the mission report.
"Is there anyone Zaghawa among you?" one militant is accused of asking. "If we find Zaghawa, we will kill them all."
Another survivor described starvation during the siege: “Life became unbearable. We were eating only... the food for livestock. When there was no more, we ate the skin of the animal. We soaked it in water and ate.”
In one of the worst atrocities of the el-Fasher offensive, RSF fighters massacred more than 460 people at the Saudi Maternity Hospital. One RSF militant recorded himself walking across a floor strewn with dead bodies and gunning down a survivor when they rise up from the pile of corpses.
The UN experts called RSF’s crimes in el-Fasher “an aggravation of earlier patterns” of attacks on other non-Arab communities in Sudan, “but on a far more lethal scale.”
"The body of evidence we collected—including the prolonged siege, starvation, and denial of humanitarian assistance, followed by mass killings, rape, torture and enforced disappearance, systematic humiliation, and perpetrators’ own declarations—leaves only one reasonable inference,” mission member Mona Rishmawi said.
“The RSF acted with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Zaghawa and Fur communities in el-Fasher," she added. "These are the hallmarks of genocide."
The Zaghawa and Fur are two of the largest non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur. Both peoples have historically faced rampant discrimination and were targeted during the 2003-05 genocide. Many had already been forcibly displaced multiple times before the renewal of conflict in the spring of 2023.
That's when rival factions of Sudan’s military government—primarily the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and their erstwhile RSF allies—began battling, with violence subsequently spreading rapidly throughout the northeastern African nation of 46 million people. The SAF has also been accused of widespread war crimes and has been blamed for famine conditions caused in part by its refusal to allow food aid to enter RSF-controlled areas.
The mission report lamented that "no effective measures were taken by any party to protect the civilian population," despite UN experts sounding the alarm as early as November 2023. US officials during the Biden administration were hesitant to accuse RSF fighters of genocide, reportedly because they thought it would spark criticism of then-President Joe Biden's denial of Israel's genocide in Gaza.
The US ultimately declared genocide in Darfur three weeks before Biden left office in January 2025—a determination affirmed by President Donald Trump's secretary of state, Marco Rubio, during his Senate confirmation process.
A group of US House Democrats led by Reps. Gregory Meeks (NY) and Sara Jacobs (Calif.) have called on the Trump administration to block weapons transfers to the UAE as it arms and finances the RSF and provides diplomatic cover for its atrocities.
Last March, Sudan filed a case in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands accusing the UAE of "complicity in genocide."
Emirati officials strongly deny such allegations.
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A Young Child Could Die Every 40 Seconds by 2030 Due to 'Cruel and Illegal' Trump Aid Cuts
"We are seeing years of progress unravel, and more children suffer and die preventable deaths because of these cuts."
Jan 15, 2026
President Donald Trump's shuttering of USAID last year will have a long-term negative impact on children throughout the world, according to a report released on Thursday by Oxfam.
In its analysis, Oxfam estimates that a child under the age of five could die every 40 seconds by 2030 thanks to the Trump administration's dismantling of American foreign aid programs.
Oxfam says it's basing its projections on "calculations in [the] Lancet’s impact evaluation and forecasting analysis from last July, which projected "4,537,157 child deaths by 2030."
The report also pointed to estimates from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and Gates Foundation, which calculates "an additional 200,000 child deaths" for children under five last year. This lines up with data published by the Boston University School of Public Health last year estimating over 250,000 child deaths caused by the drastic slashing of foreign aid funding under the Trump administration.
Abby Maxman, president and CEO of Oxfam America, said that "we have run out of words to describe the depths of suffering" caused by Trump's destruction of "the entire global aid system."
"We are seeing years of progress unravel, and more children suffer and die preventable deaths because of these cuts," Maxman added.
The report also highlighted the specific impacts cuts have had in Sudan, the Philippines, and Syria.
Mayfourth Luneta, deputy executive director of the Center for Disaster Preparedness Foundation, an Oxfam partner in the Philippines, said that due to the Trump aid cuts, her organization had to cancel programs across eight communities that were impacted by floods and earthquakes last year.
"The Philippines was hit with the most powerful storms on Earth recorded last year," Luneta said. "Communities were devastated, families were left with nothing."
Shabnam Baloch, country director for Oxfam in South Sudan, described the impact that aid cuts have had on a country that is undergoing a horrific civil war.
"Water borne illnesses are spreading rapidly, starvation is imminent for many, and while needs are rising, lifesaving organizations are working with a fraction of the resources we had in previous years," said Baloch. "Oxfam, along with many other vital organizations, will be forced to scale down our programs without immediate intervention."
Sara Savva, deputy director-general the alliance of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East and the Department of Ecumenical Relations and Development (GOPA-DERD), an Oxfam partner in Syria, said her organization had "to drastically reduce the scale and scope of our programs for Syrian families and Iraqi refugees residing in Syria" in the wake of the Trump administration's cuts.
"We were notified we will no longer receive funding from the US government, and thousands of people are left without crucial services necessary to rebuild their lives after a catastrophic civil war," Savva said.
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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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