The RSF In Sudan Committed Crimes Against Humanity During Its Takeover Of El Fasher, Amnesty Found
Amnesty is now calling for an immediate nationwide pause in fighting and the deployment of an international force to protect civilians in Sudan.
After more than three years of Sudan’s civil war, a new investigation has concluded that Sudan's Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group committed crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing against the Sudanese people during its takeover of El Fasher city.
Since 2023, Sudan has been in a brutal war due to a power struggle between the Sudanese military and RSF that has killed up to 150,000 people, including thousands of children.
El Fasher was the Sudanese military’s last stronghold in the Darfur region of western Sudan.
RSF then besieged El Fasher, where more than 250,000 people live, while fighting the Sudanese army, for 18 months with reports of killings, humiliation, rape and starvation of civilians before it captured the city on Oct. 26.
During the RSF takeover of the city, witnesses and rights groups reported mass killings, including at a hospital, along with widespread sexual violence and looting.
Satellite photos analyzed by Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) have unveiled evidence of mass killings in El Fasher visible from space.
At least 6,000 people were killed in just three days when the RSF captured the besieged and famine-struck city in late October, according to the UN human rights office.
A UN fact-finding mission later said the killings showed the hallmarks of genocide against ethnic minority communities, including the Zaghawa and Fur peoples.
On July 1, Amnesty published a new report that documented abuses committed in and around El Fasher between early 2024 and October 2025, based on interviews with 247 people, including 208 survivors and witnesses, as well as satellite images and verified video, concluding that the RSF committed crimes against humanity, including murder, torture, imprisonment, rape, sexual slavery and enslavement.
The report also found that the destruction of villages mainly inhabited by the Zaghawa ethnic group in the Abu Zerega area outside El Fasher amounted to ethnic cleansing.
The report said RSF fighters used ethnic slurs during attacks and while holding people in detention, including in shipping containers where detainees were denied food and water and, in some cases, died of disease or dehydration.
Amnesty International interviewed 45 people who said they were unlawfully detained, including eight children.
Amnesty International's Secretary General Agnès Callamard said the report showed the world's warnings about El Fasher had gone unheeded and called the events "a stain on the conscience of humanity."
The RSF has not formally responded to the report.
Amnesty is now calling for an immediate nationwide pause in fighting and the deployment of an international force to protect civilians in Sudan.
It also called for countries to stop supplying weapons to all sides in the war, and specifically urged a halt to arms sales to the UAE, which Amnesty International and other rights groups say is the RSF's main foreign backer.
The war has displaced more than 14 million people, the world's largest displacement crisis.
The UN is warning that another human rights catastrophe is unfolding in Sudan around the besieged city of al-Obeid, where the RSF has been advancing, urging the world to act.
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