El-Fasher and the West's Silence on RSF Crimes in Sudan

Introduction: a report that indicts the Rapid Support Forces

Amnesty International documents the horror of El-Fasher

A new report from Amnesty International, published on July 1, 2026, indicts the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Sudan's paramilitary militia, for crimes against humanity committed during the siege and capture of the city of El-Fasher, in North Darfur. Titled "City Under Siege, Children Under Fire," this report of more than 200 pages rests on eight months of investigation and 247 interviews, including 39 with children, a considerable evidentiary base that makes these findings particularly difficult for the international community to dismiss.

The Secretary General of Amnesty International, Agnès Callamard, described the situation as "a war against civilians" and "a stain on the conscience of humanity," words of rare gravity that reflect the scale of what her teams documented on the ground around this strategic city in western Sudan.

An eighteen-month siege that starved an entire city

El-Fasher, home to more than 1.5 million people before the conflict, endured an RSF siege stretching from May 2024 to October 2025, a period during which access to food and humanitarian aid was systematically restricted, plunging the population into a famine that Amnesty International documents in precise detail in its report, forcing some residents to survive on ambaz, a peanut-oil production residue normally reserved for livestock.

This strategy of prolonged siege, followed by a final assault on October 26, 2025, allowed the RSF to seize the last major garrison held by the Sudanese army in the Darfur region, ending eighteen months of fierce resistance by the Joint Forces defending the city alongside the regular army.

The deliberate ethnic targeting of non-Arab communities

The Zaghawa community singled out systematically

One of the most troubling elements of the report concerns the systematic targeting of the Zaghawa community, a non-Arab ethnic group heavily present in the El-Fasher region, several of whose members fought within the Joint Forces defending the city. According to Amnesty International, Arab RSF fighters targeted Zaghawa civilians regardless of any involvement in hostilities, routinely hurling ethnic slurs meaning "slave" or "servant."

In the Abu Zerega area, roughly 35 kilometers south of El-Fasher, the destruction of predominantly Zaghawa villages matches, according to Amnesty investigators, a distinct pattern of ethnic cleansing, with residents treated as collectively responsible for the actions of the fighters who defended the city.

Children deliberately targeted

The report places particular emphasis on the fate of children, noting that they "were not simply collateral damage," in the words of Agnès Callamard, but were often "intentionally targeted" and suffered injuries, abductions, and forced recruitment on a large scale, a chilling reality documented through testimony from dozens of survivors gathered by the organization's investigators.

Hundreds of thousands of children were displaced during this military campaign, many of them risking death or repeated injury while fleeing combat zones, while countless others are now orphaned, left to fend for themselves in overcrowded displacement camps across the Darfur region.

The methods documented by Amnesty's investigators

A meticulous investigation built on hundreds of testimonies

The methodological rigor of the Amnesty International report deserves emphasis: investigators analyzed 89 publicly available videos along with detailed satellite imagery of North Darfur, cross-referencing these materials with direct survivor testimony to establish a precise timeline of the abuses committed between early 2024 and October 2025.

This combination of sources, ranging from human testimony to digital and satellite evidence, gives the report a credibility that is difficult to dispute, including for the RSF itself, which did not respond to Amnesty International's requests for comment on the specific findings of this in-depth investigation.

Commanders named directly by the organization

In a rare move for this type of report, Amnesty International made the unusual decision to directly name three RSF commanders it holds responsible for the worst documented abuses, including one identified as Abu Lulu, accused of orchestrating the summary execution of prisoners wearing civilian clothing during the capture of the city.

This naming of alleged perpetrators is explicitly intended to pave the way for future prosecutions, with Amnesty International calling on the international community to support existing accountability mechanisms, particularly the International Criminal Court, so that these individuals may one day answer for their actions before a court of law.

The troubling role of the United Arab Emirates in this conflict

Foreign support flagged by human rights organizations

Several Amnesty International reports, including earlier publications covering other episodes of the El-Fasher siege, point to material support provided by the United Arab Emirates to the RSF, outside backing that the organization believes directly enabled the continuation of the military campaign against civilian populations in the Darfur region.

This accusation, reiterated by Amnesty International in its statement accompanying the July 2026 report, explicitly calls on Western countries, particularly the United States and the European Union, to pressure Abu Dhabi to end all support for the Sudanese paramilitary militia, including through the ongoing bilateral trade negotiations between the EU and the Emirates.

The arms embargo, a tool that needs strengthening

The organization is also asking the United Nations Security Council to extend to the whole of Sudanese territory the arms embargo that has, for nearly two decades, applied only to the Darfur region, an international legal instrument whose effectiveness remains largely undermined by repeated circumventions documented by several independent organizations.

This call to expand the embargo is paired with an urgent appeal to all states, without exception, to immediately halt any supply of weapons and ammunition to the warring Sudanese parties, a demand that, if rigorously enforced, could significantly limit the RSF's operational capacity on the ground.

The UN's assessment of a possible targeted extermination campaign

An independent fact-finding mission with chilling conclusions

Ahead of the Amnesty International report, an independent fact-finding mission mandated by the United Nations had already concluded, in February 2026, that the events surrounding the capture of El-Fasher bore what it called the "hallmarks" of the gravest crimes recognized under international law, a conclusion based on more than 320 interviews with survivors and corroborated satellite imagery analysis.

Expert Mona Rishmawi, a member of this UN-mandated investigative mission, summarized the gathered evidence as leading to only "one logical conclusion" regarding the intent behind these acts targeting the region's Zaghawa and Fur communities, a statement of exceptional gravity in the usually measured language of United Nations bodies.

The British and international diplomatic response

British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper called these findings "truly horrifying" and announced her intention to present them directly to the United Nations Security Council, stressing the need for international criminal investigations to secure some measure of justice for the victims of this campaign.

This British diplomatic push is part of a broader wave of international pressure, though several observers, including within Amnesty International, lament the slowness of the international community's concrete response to warning signs that, in their view, had been visible for many months before the city actually fell.

Amnesty International's concrete demands to the international community

A national ceasefire and an international protection force

At the close of its report, Amnesty International lays out a series of specific demands addressed to the international community, starting with the call for an immediate national ceasefire in Sudan, backed by coordinated pressure from the African Union and other regional bodies on the two main parties to the conflict, the Sudanese army and the RSF.

The organization also demands the rapid deployment of an independent, adequately resourced international force to protect civilian populations from abuses committed by all parties to the conflict, a force that, according to Amnesty, should have solid expertise in human rights and child protection.

Stronger backing for existing judicial mechanisms

The report also stresses the need to guarantee sufficient financial and political support for the accountability mechanisms already in place concerning Sudan, particularly the International Criminal Court and the fact-finding missions backed by the United Nations and the African Union, so that those allegedly responsible for the documented abuses can one day be brought before competent courts.

This emphasis on the judicial dimension reflects Amnesty International's conviction that, without a real prospect of criminal sanctions for responsible commanders, the RSF will keep reproducing the same patterns of violence against civilian populations in other regions of Sudan, particularly in the currently threatened areas of Kordofan.

Why the West must break its relative silence on Sudan

A crisis eclipsed by other geopolitical conflicts

It must be acknowledged that the Sudanese crisis, despite its considerable humanitarian scale, remains largely overshadowed in Western media coverage by other conflicts, particularly Russia's war in Ukraine and tensions in the Middle East, an imbalance in international attention that carries real consequences for effective diplomatic and financial mobilization toward Sudan.

This implicit ranking of crises, in which some humanitarian tragedies receive far greater political and media attention than others, deserves to be questioned honestly, especially since the number of civilian casualties and displaced people in Sudan ranks among the highest of any conflict currently underway anywhere in the world.

A moral responsibility that outweighs strategic interests alone

While the West must remain focused on the major strategic threats posed by Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea to the international order, this should never justify relative indifference toward humanitarian tragedies of this magnitude simply because they unfold in a region perceived as peripheral to the immediate geostrategic interests of the major Western powers.

A Western foreign policy genuinely consistent with its proclaimed values of defending human rights should grant Sudan a level of diplomatic and humanitarian attention proportional to the documented gravity of the abuses committed, rather than reserving that attention almost exclusively for crises that directly touch Western economic or security interests.

The humanitarian fallout for Darfur's displaced

Overwhelmed displacement camps in an already exhausted region

The fall of El-Fasher triggered a massive influx of displaced people toward the nearby towns of Tawila and Tina, on the border with Chad, where already limited humanitarian capacity has been completely overwhelmed by the scale of need. Humanitarian organizations on the ground describe precarious sanitary conditions, insufficient access to clean water, and a glaring shortage of qualified medical staff to care for the wounded and traumatized victims of this military campaign.

This catastrophic humanitarian situation compounds years of conflict that have already displaced millions of people across Sudan, making this one of the world's gravest crises in terms of forced population displacement, a reality several United Nations agencies are struggling to bring to the attention of the Western public despite repeated appeals for international financial aid.

The glaring shortfall in international humanitarian funding

Despite the documented scale of this crisis, United Nations humanitarian funding appeals for Sudan remain chronically underfunded by the international community, a budget shortfall that directly limits the ability of organizations on the ground to meet the urgent needs of displaced populations in the Darfur region and elsewhere in the country.

This persistent underfunding illustrates, once again, the gap between the documented severity of the Sudanese crisis and the political and financial attention actually granted by the major Western powers, an imbalance that several humanitarian organizations regularly denounce without managing to durably reverse the trend.

Conclusion: El-Fasher, a test for the international conscience

A report that can no longer be ignored

The Amnesty International report on El-Fasher stands as a damning document that documents, with methodological rigor difficult to dispute, the scale of suffering inflicted on the civilian population of this city and its surrounding region by the Rapid Support Forces. Faced with this level of documentation, the international community's prolonged inaction becomes less and less morally defensible.

The 247 testimonies gathered, the detailed satellite analyses, and the naming of responsible commanders provide a solid foundation for any future judicial action, provided the necessary political will finally materializes within the competent international bodies to turn these findings into actual prosecutions.

What history will remember of this international response

History will judge harshly the response, or the absence of response, from the international community to what the Amnesty International report describes as a systematic campaign against civilian populations targeted because of their ethnicity. Sudan deserves attention proportionate to the documented gravity of its tragedy, not the relative indifference dictated by geography or the strategic priorities of the moment.

For the survivors of El-Fasher, who agreed to testify despite the obvious risks to their personal safety, the only acceptable response from the international community remains swift, concrete action, rather than more diplomatic statements with no tangible follow-through on the ground.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

Who I am and my limitations

I am a columnist, not an expert in international humanitarian law nor a specialist on the Darfur region. My analysis relies exclusively on reading the Amnesty International report and on several international news outlets that covered its release. I have never set foot in Sudan, and I claim no field expertise I do not actually possess.

My method and my acknowledged biases

My method consists of cross-referencing reports from recognized human rights organizations with coverage from several international media outlets before forming my editorial opinion. My acknowledged bias is that of a pro-Western columnist who believes the defense of universal human rights must remain a constant priority of Western diplomacy, including in parts of the world that do not systematically make headline news.

Sources

Primary sources

Amnesty International, full report on RSF crimes against humanity in North Darfur — July 1, 2026

Amnesty International, Agnès Callamard's introductory speech on the El-Fasher report — July 2, 2026

Secondary sources

BBC, Rapid Support Forces accused of crimes against humanity in El-Fasher — July 1, 2026

Al Jazeera, Amnesty says RSF committed ethnic cleansing in Sudan's El-Fasher — July 1, 2026

BBC, UN says abuses bear the hallmarks of the gravest crimes under international law — February 19, 2026

Deutsche Welle, warnings mount over the risk of new mass atrocities in Sudan