The International Criminal Court said on Thursday it had “reasonable grounds” to conclude that war crimes and crimes against humanity were unfolding in Sudan’s western Darfur region, where the county’s civil war has thrust the region into a deepening catastrophe.
“The humanitarian position has reached an intolerable state,” the court’s deputy prosecutor, Nazhat Shameem Khan, told the United Nations Security Council on Thursday. “People are being deprived of water and food. Rape and sexual violence are being weaponized. Abductions for ransom or to bolster the ranks of armed groups have become common practice.”
Among the court’s worst findings was “an inescapable pattern” of women and girls being raped or subjected to other sexual violence because of their gender and ethnicity, Ms. Khan said.
While Ms. Khan did not specify who had committed the war crimes in the court’s findings, both of the warring parties in the civil war have previously been accused of atrocities by officials from the United States, the United Nations and human rights groups.
The determination that war crimes were being committed came after the prosecutor’s office collected about 7,000 pieces of evidence, including the testimony of victims, Ms. Khan said. Investigators have made repeated trips to speak with victim groups and to interview witnesses in refugee camps in neighboring Chad, where many people from Darfur have fled.
Sudan’s civil war erupted in April 2023 and the brutal fighting has killed tens of thousands of people, driven millions more from their homes and caused widespread famine.
The Sudanese military is fighting the Rapid Support Forces, a powerful paramilitary group born from the remnants of another militia, the Janjaweed, which, in the 2000s, was responsible for the slaughter of ethnic African groups in Darfur.
The military has massacred civilians in indiscriminate bombing raids. The R.S.F. has been accused of ethnic cleansing, particularly during a wave of systematic violence in Darfur in 2023. Its fighters, who are mostly ethnic Arabs, are accused of targeting members of the Masalit, a non-Arab ethnic group.
Ms. Khan said her office was determined to seek “meaningful justice” for victims of killings and sexual violence in Darfur. But even as she said investigators had made significant progress in building cases over the last six months, she issued a dark warning. “We should not be under any illusions,” she said. “Things can still get worse.”
Last year, the International Criminal Court appealed to the public for evidence of abuses in Darfur.
Little data has been collected about sexual violence in Sudan — or in the Darfur region in particular. A 2024 U.N. fact-finding mission found that gender-based violence, including rape and sexual slavery, was prevalent in areas with fighting between the military and the Rapid Support Forces.
A UNICEF report released earlier this year documented hundreds of cases of child rape at the hands of armed men in Sudan.
The Rapid Support Forces paramilitary largely controls Darfur, with the exception of the embattled city of El Fasher, the last city held by the Sudanese military there.
Scores of people, including women and children, were killed from fighting around the city during two weeks in April. In June, five members of a U.N. convoy carrying aid to the city were killed in an attack that wounded others and burned many trucks. The convoy would have been the U.N.’s first humanitarian convoy to arrive in the capital of North Darfur State in over a year.
Officials have warned that if the city falls, more massacres are likely to ensue.
Eve Sampson is a reporter covering international news and a member of the 2024-25 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
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