A brutal, 18-month assault by Sudanese paramilitaries on the city of El Fasher, culminating in a spree of massacre, torture and rape in October, bore the “hallmarks of genocide,” according to a United Nations report published on Thursday.
The finding was documented in gruesome detail by human rights experts. It is the first time a U.N.-mandated body has accused the paramilitaries, known as the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F., of committing acts of genocide.
The U.N. group does not have the authority to make a formal determination of genocide, which can come from bodies like the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court.
But the U.N. report offered fresh evidence of how El Fasher, a now-deserted city in the western Sudanese region of Darfur, became a symbol of the worst abuses in the country’s civil war, which is approaching its fourth year.
Although the report did not focus on the role of foreign powers in the war, the accusations of genocide are likely to bring new scrutiny to the United Arab Emirates, which is accused of supplying the R.S.F. with weapons, mercenaries and other support, especially in El Fasher.
A spokesman for the R.S.F. did not respond to requests for comment on the U.N. report. The leader of the R.S.F., Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, previously acknowledged some atrocities by his troops during the assault, but there is little evidence that any were investigated, and he has praised the fighters involved as “heroes.”
The Emirates denies supporting either side. In an email, the Emirati foreign ministry expressed “deep concern” at the findings of the U.N. report, and condemned atrocities by the R.S.F. and Sudan’s military.
The two sides have been fighting since April 2023 in a calamitous civil war that has created one of the world’s greatest ongoing humanitarian crises.
Last year, the United States determined that R.S.F. fighters, who are mostly ethnic Arabs, had committed genocide in late 2023 against the non-Arab Masalit group during their assault on El Geneina, a city in western Darfur.
The accusations in the U.N. report suggest a similar pattern of ethnic targeting in El Fasher.
Last fall, R.S.F. fighters filmed themselves carrying out executions and massacres as they swept through the city, generating global outrage.
The U.N. report released on Thursday confirmed those accounts and framed them as part of a campaign targeting two other non-Arab groups, the Zaghawa and the Fur. Fighters starved, raped and killed civilians as part of a “planned and organized operation” to eliminate those groups, the report found.
The report found that three of the five criteria in an international convention known colloquially as the “genocide convention” had been met.
The siege of El Fasher began in May 2024 as the R.S.F. sought to rout the Sudanese military from its last stronghold in Darfur. It intensified early last summer after the R.S.F. was pushed out of Khartoum, Sudan’s capital.
R.S.F. fighters encircled the city with a high earthen berm, starving 260,000 people trapped inside. Survivors cited in the U.N. report recalled intensive drone and artillery bombing and explicit threats to “clean” the city.
The threats focused on the Zaghawa and Fur because men from those groups were fighting with militias that had allied themselves with Sudan’s military to defend a garrison in the city.
When the R.S.F. finally seized El Fasher in late October, fighters executed fleeing civilians and survivors hid in piles of corpses. Some were blindfolded, bound and driven away as fighters chanted “slave, slave, slave,” the report said.
A commander identified as Abu Lulu executed detainees in trenches and shot dead a pregnant woman after asking how far she was into her pregnancy, the report said. Survivors said that Abu Lulu had told prisoners that he would kill them “like fat autumn locusts” as he marched them to El Fasher University, one of the biggest execution sites.
The R.S.F. said in October that it had arrested Abu Lulu after videos of him brutalizing civilians caused a global outcry. But the paramilitaries provided no evidence that he faced discipline or that he was still in custody, the U.N. report said.
It also noted that the R.S.F. assault was backed by drones that struck hospitals and mosques and by foreign mercenaries, although it did not specify who supplied them.
The New York Times and other outlets have reported that the United Arab Emirates supplied drones and other weapons used in the siege of El Fasher. In 2024, another group of U.N. investigators backed those findings.
In December, the United States Treasury imposed sanctions on a network that it accused of sending Colombian mercenaries to El Fasher in support of the R.S.F., including a former Colombian soldier in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
The Sentry, a Washington-based research and advocacy group, previously published corporate records showing that the mercenaries had been hired by an Emirati businessman who was a business partner of a senior Emirati official.
In response to questions about those accusations, the Emirati foreign ministry said there was no evidence for “baseless claims associating the U.A.E. with violations of international law in Sudan.”
Declan Walsh is the chief Africa correspondent for The Times based in Nairobi, Kenya. He previously reported from Cairo, covering the Middle East, and Islamabad, Pakistan.
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