On 8 July 2026, a United Nations fact-finding mission published a conclusion that international bodies almost never reach in the present tense, while the events are still unfolding. What the Rapid Support Forces did in the Darfur city of El Fasher, it found, bears “distinct markers of genocide.”
Two days earlier, the UN Human Rights Council had adopted a resolution — without a vote, meaning no member state was willing to be recorded opposing it — requesting an urgent inquiry into a second Sudanese city. Not because atrocities had been documented there, but because the mission’s members believed they were about to be.
That city is El Obeid. It holds more than 500,000 residents and over 100,000 internally displaced people who fled there believing it was safer than where they came from.
What the mission found in El Fasher
The Fact-Finding Mission on Sudan, mandated by the Human Rights Council, documented a pattern in El Fasher rather than a series of isolated incidents. Its findings describe mass killings; the systematic abduction of women and girls; mass gang rape; torture; the taking of civilians for ransom; and enforced disappearances.
The distinction between “atrocities” and “markers of genocide” is not rhetorical. Genocide, in law, requires more than scale or cruelty: it requires intent to destroy a group, in whole or in part, as such. The mission’s language points to patterns from which that intent can be inferred — who was targeted, how consistently, and according to what logic.
The report builds on an earlier mission finding published under the title Hallmarks of Genocide in El-Fasher. Amnesty International published its own investigation in July 2026, describing RSF conduct in the city as “a stain on the conscience of humanity.”
A note on numbers: precise death, rape and abduction tolls for El Fasher circulate widely, but this publication has not been able to verify a specific figure against a primary UN or Sudanese government tally. We have therefore not reproduced one. The absence of a confirmed number should not be read as an absence of scale — it reflects how difficult verification becomes in a city that was besieged, then taken, with humanitarian access and communications severed for extended periods.
Three warnings, on the record
The mission’s members made a series of unusually direct statements when the findings were released.
Mohamed Chande Othman, the mission’s chair and a former Chief Justice of Tanzania, framed El Fasher as a template rather than an endpoint: “The patterns we documented in El Fasher serve as a stark warning.”
Mona Rishmawi, a mission member, was more specific about what the warning was for: “El Obeid must not become the next crime scene.”
Joy Ngozi Ezeilo, also a member, identified the gap that the international response keeps falling into: “Accountability remains essential, but so too does prevention.”
That last sentence describes a structural problem, not a Sudanese one. International accountability machinery — tribunals, commissions, referrals — is built to operate after the fact. It documents, attributes, and occasionally prosecutes, typically years later. The El Obeid inquiry is an attempt to point that machinery at a city before rather than after, which is rare and which nobody should assume will work.
How Sudan got here
The war began on 15 April 2023, between the Sudanese Armed Forces under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, universally known as Hemedti.
The two men were not natural rivals. They had been partners. Together they removed Sudan’s transitional civilian government, ending the political opening that followed the fall of Omar al-Bashir in 2019. Having jointly disposed of the civilians, they fell out over the terms on which the RSF would be folded into the regular army — a question about who would ultimately command Sudan’s guns, and therefore Sudan.
The RSF’s institutional ancestry matters for understanding what happened in El Fasher. Its lineage runs back to the Janjaweed militias mobilised in Darfur in the early 2000s, whose campaign against the region’s non-Arab communities produced the first genocide determinations of the twenty-first century and, eventually, an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Bashir himself.
Darfur, in other words, is not encountering this for the first time. Neither are the institutions now investigating it. That is precisely what makes the mission’s warning about El Obeid land the way it does: the same region, comparable findings, roughly two decades apart, with the intervening accountability process having failed to prevent a recurrence.
Why a battlefield victory would not end it
Through August 2026, fighting continued across western Sudan and in the Blue Nile region. The military picture has shifted — Al Jazeera asked on 10 August whether the army had “turned the page” on control of western Sudan — but the analytical consensus is that the shift solves less than it appears to.
An Al Jazeera analysis published 26 August argued that an RSF defeat “will not end Sudan’s war but merely fragment it.” The reasoning is straightforward. The RSF is not a single hierarchical army but a coalition of armed groups, tribal networks and commercial interests, many with independent revenue streams, particularly from gold. Defeat at the centre does not dissolve the periphery. It disperses it.
Sudan would then face what Libya has faced since 2011: not a war between two sides that can be won, but a landscape of armed actors with local bases, no shared command, and no single negotiating partner. That configuration is markedly harder to end, because there is nobody with the authority to sign.
Why this receives so little attention
By almost any measure — people killed, people displaced, populations facing famine conditions — Sudan is among the largest humanitarian catastrophes in the world. It receives a fraction of the coverage and a fraction of the funding directed at conflicts of comparable or smaller scale.
The reasons are unedifying but not mysterious. Sudan has no significant Western diaspora media presence. Access for international journalists has been severely restricted, which means few images and fewer eyewitness accounts reach editors. No major power has framed the war as a strategic priority. And the conflict lacks the clean moral architecture that sustains attention: both principal belligerents stand accused of atrocities, which makes the story resistant to the shorthand that news cycles run on.
None of that changes what is happening in Darfur. It only changes how many people know.
What to watch
- The El Obeid inquiry. Whether it reports before rather than after mass violence is the test of the entire preventive premise.
- Accountability mechanisms. Ezeilo’s reference to accountability points toward ICC referrals or targeted sanctions. Watch whether any state actually initiates one.
- Humanitarian access. Verification, aid delivery and famine assessment all depend on it, and all three have been intermittent.
- Fragmentation. If RSF-aligned formations begin operating independently of central command, the diagnosis in the August analysis will have been confirmed — and the diplomatic problem will have become substantially harder.
What the legal threshold actually requires
“Genocide” is used loosely in public argument and precisely in law, and the difference explains why the mission chose the wording it did.
The 1948 Genocide Convention defines the crime as specified acts — killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, inflicting conditions calculated to bring about destruction, preventing births, forcibly transferring children — committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.
The acts are usually the easier element to establish. Intent is where cases are won and lost, and it is rarely written down. Tribunals therefore infer it from patterns: whether victims were selected by group membership, whether the conduct was systematic rather than opportunistic, whether the scale and manner of the violence make any other explanation implausible, and whether perpetrators used language identifying the group.
This is why the mission’s phrase — “distinct markers of genocide” — is careful rather than evasive. A fact-finding mission is not a court. It cannot make a determination of criminal responsibility. What it can do is document the pattern from which a court would later infer intent, and say plainly that the pattern is present.
The distinction is not pedantry. A finding that atrocities occurred, however severe, does not carry the specific obligations that attach to genocide. A finding of genocide does.
What states are actually obliged to do
Under the Genocide Convention, parties undertake not only to punish genocide but to prevent it. The International Court of Justice has held that this duty arises the moment a state learns of a serious risk — not once genocide has been established.
That is the legal significance of the El Obeid inquiry. By publicly identifying a serious risk to a named city, the mission has made it substantially harder for governments to claim later that they did not know.
The duty is limited in an important way: it is a duty to employ means reasonably available, judged by a state’s capacity to influence events, not a duty to achieve an outcome. It does not require military intervention.
What it does make available is a set of measures short of that — targeted sanctions on named commanders, arms embargo enforcement, restrictions on the gold trade that finances the fighting, pressure on the external states supplying the belligerents, and support for evacuation and humanitarian access. Whether any of these are used is a political choice, and the record of the past three years is not encouraging.
The economics underneath the war
A conflict that has continued for more than three years is being paid for, and understanding how is necessary to understand why it persists.
The RSF’s antecedents in Darfur developed independent revenue during the 2000s, and gold has been central. Sudan is a significant gold producer, much of the output artisanal, much of it exported through informal channels. Control of mining areas and export routes provides income that does not depend on a state budget.
Both sides also draw on external support, and on control of trade corridors, agricultural land and urban commerce in the territory they hold.
Two consequences follow. First, neither force is dependent on a patron who could switch off the money. Second — and this is the point the fragmentation analysis rests on — a force funded by dispersed local revenue does not disintegrate when its central command is defeated. Individual commanders retain their own resource base and their own reasons to keep fighting.
Ending a war of this structure requires addressing the revenue, not only the leadership. That is slow, unglamorous work involving commodity supply chains and third-country regulators, and it attracts very little political attention.
Why famine and violence are the same story
In conflicts of this kind, mass death is rarely dominated by direct killing. It comes from what the fighting does to the systems people live on.
Displacement removes families from their land at planting or harvest. Markets close or become unsafe to reach. Prices rise beyond what people can pay. Clinics run out of supplies or are destroyed. Water systems stop being maintained. Aid convoys cannot obtain security guarantees, or are blocked deliberately.
The result is that famine and epidemic disease follow armed conflict with grim regularity, and they kill more people than the fighting. It is also why humanitarian access is not a secondary issue to be settled after a ceasefire: obstruction of aid is itself a method of warfare, and it is recognised as such in international humanitarian law.
Sudan has already appeared in the Global Report on Food Crises with confirmed famine conditions in parts of the country. The El Fasher findings and the food-security findings are not separate stories about the same place. They are the same story.
Sources
- OHCHR, “Sudan: Mass killings, abductions, and gang rape carried out in El Fasher constitute distinct markers of genocide, UN Fact-Finding Mission says as it launches urgent inquiry into El Obeid,” 8 July 2026 — ohchr.org
- Amnesty International, “Sudan: RSF atrocities in El Fasher ‘a stain on the conscience of humanity’,” July 2026 — amnesty.org
- Al Jazeera, “The RSF’s defeat will not end Sudan’s war but merely fragment it,” 26 August 2026 — aljazeera.com
- Al Jazeera, “Has the Sudanese army turned the page on control of western Sudan?,” 10 August 2026 — aljazeera.com
- Council on Foreign Relations, Global Conflict Tracker, “Civil War in Sudan” — cfr.org
