Sudan's Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary committed crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing during their campaign to seize El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, according to a major report released by Amnesty International on Wednesday. The findings add to a growing body of evidence documenting some of the worst atrocities of Sudan's civil war, which erupted in April 2023 from a power struggle between the regular Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the RSF, headed by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti.

Amnesty's report, based on interviews with 247 survivors and witnesses, analysis of 89 open-source videos, and extensive satellite imagery from North Darfur, concluded that RSF fighters committed at least eight of the eleven acts defined as crimes against humanity under the International Criminal Court's statute — including murder, torture, rape, sexual slavery, enslavement, deportation, extermination and persecution on ethnic grounds. The RSF captured El Fasher in October 2025 after an 18-month siege, with the UN reporting more than 6,000 people killed in just three days of the final assault. The organisation named three RSF commanders it holds responsible for serious violations of international law: Major General Gedo Hamdan Ahmed Mohamed, Lieutenant Colonel Abbas Khater Bakhit, and commander Al-Fateh Abdullah Idris.

A central finding of the report is the deliberate targeting of children and non-Arab communities, particularly the Zaghawa ethnic group, which has a long presence in western Darfur. RSF fighters repeatedly used ethnic slurs translating as