A UN fact-finding mission has said that evidence shows “hallmarks of genocide” against the Zaghawa and Fur Black communities in El Fasher, Sudan, and signals an ongoing risk of further atrocities.

The fact-finding mission also said the Rapid Support Forces carried out ethnically targeted killings, widespread sexual violence, and enforced disappearances during their late-October takeover of El Fasher in Sudan’s Darfur region

In a report released on Thursday, the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan said the evidence establishes that at least three underlying acts of genocide were committed against non-Arabs.

“(These are) 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. They formed part of a planned and organised operation that bears the defining characteristics of genocide,” Mohamed Chande Othman, chair of the mission, said.

The findings focus on events in and around El Fasher, during the RSF takeover in late October 2025, after what the mission described as an 18-month siege that progressively cut off civilians from food, water, medical supplies, and humanitarian assistance.

The report said the siege “systematically weakened the targeted population through starvation, deprivation, trauma and confinement”, leaving many unable to flee when the assault came.

The Sudan conflict erupted on April 15, 2023, when fighting broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces and their former allies, the paramilitary RSF.

The war has since spread across large swathes of the country, with civilians repeatedly bearing the brunt of urban warfare, shifting front lines, and the collapse of basic services.

The fact-finding mission said the conduct in El Fasher was “an aggravation of earlier patterns” of attacks on other non-Arab communities elsewhere in Sudan, “but on a far more lethal scale”.

Genocidal intent, the mission said, was “the only reasonable inference” from the RSF’s “systematic pattern of ethnically targeted killings, sexual violence, destruction, and public statements explicitly calling for the elimination of non-Arab communities”.

Survivors cited RSF fighters as saying, “Is there anyone Zaghawa among you? If we find Zaghawa, we will kill them all” and “We want to eliminate anything black from Darfur.”

The fact-finding mission was established by the UN Human Rights Council in October 2023 and mandated to investigate alleged human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law in the conflict.

These include identifying, where possible, those responsible for the atrocities.

The report will be presented to the Human Rights Council on February 26, 2026.

(NAN)