Imagine a city of half a million people — hospitals, markets, mosques, entire generations of culture — reduced to ash and satellite-verified mass graves in the span of weeks. Not in some imagined future war, but in El Fasher, Sudan, in October 2025. After an 18-month siege designed to starve its population into submission, the Rapid Support Forces seized the last major city in Darfur on October 27, 2025. What followed, according to a February 2026 UN Fact-Finding Mission, carries the hallmarks of genocide — a word the international community does not deploy lightly, and rarely deploys in time.
The world has spent years asking what is happening in Darfur. Satellite imagery, survivor testimonies, forensic data, and ICC briefings have answered that question in devastating, granular detail. The question being avoided — the question that actually determines whether this ends — is who is making it happen, and who is keeping it going with money, weapons, and the kind of calculated silence that passes for foreign policy.
This is not a tribal feud that spiraled beyond anyone's control. The Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa communities of Darfur — the same peoples targeted in the first genocide of the 21st century — are being exterminated again. There are architects. There are financiers. There are governments in gleaming Gulf capitals who profit from the arrangement. And there is an international order that has, so far, decided that Sudanese lives are an acceptable price for business as usual.
The RSF: A Militia Born from Genocide, Now Committing Another
The Rapid Support Forces did not emerge from nowhere. They are the institutional successor to the Janjaweed — the same Arab paramilitary groupings that carried out the mass atrocities in Darfur between 2003 and 2005, killing an estimated 200,000 civilians and displacing 2.7 million. Sudan's then-President Omar al-Bashir — indicted by the ICC for genocide in 2009 and still not extradited as of early 2026 — formally restructured the Janjaweed into the RSF in 2013, rewarding their commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo ("Hemedti") with official rank, state resources, and the gold-mining concessions that would make him extraordinarily wealthy.
When Sudan's civil war erupted on April 15, 2023, after the power-sharing arrangement between Hemedti and SAF General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan collapsed into open conflict, the RSF turned its weapons against the same non-Arab communities its predecessor had targeted twenty years earlier. This was not coincidence. The UN Fact-Finding Mission's February 2026 report concluded that the RSF possessed what legal scholars call dolus specialis — specific genocidal intent — and executed it with systematic purpose across El Fasher and North Darfur.
Tribal Fault Lines as Cover for Organized Crime
The RSF draws its core fighting force from Baggara Arab tribes whose historical tensions with non-Arab communities — the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa — are real and rooted in generations of competition over land, water, and cattle routes. But what is happening in Darfur today is not a community conflict that got out of hand. It is a calculated campaign that weaponizes existing grievances to pursue territorial control, resource extraction, and political dominance under the cover of tribal warfare.
That distinction matters enormously. A conflict is a tragedy; organized ethnic cleansing is a crime. Every piece of evidence accumulated since April 2023 points to the latter — and the perpetrators and their backers know exactly what they are doing.
El Fasher: What the World's Largest Displacement Crisis Looks Like Up Close
For most of 2024 and into 2025, El Fasher stood as the only major city in Darfur not under RSF control — a besieged sanctuary that had become home to hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people, including survivors of earlier massacres in Geneina and across West Darfur. The RSF's siege was not a military operation in any conventional sense. It was a starvation strategy: constructing an earthen berm to prevent civilians from leaving, blockading aid convoys, targeting the markets and community kitchens that kept people alive, and systematically destroying agricultural villages and livestock corrals in the surrounding region to eliminate any backup food supply.
El Fasher fell on October 26–27, 2025. The aftermath was immediate and documented. Door-to-door killings began within hours in the Daraja Oula neighborhood. The Saudi Maternity Hospital — already attacked five separate times during October alone — had sick and wounded patients killed inside its wards, according to UN reports. At least 25 women were gang-raped when RSF forces entered a displaced persons shelter near El Fasher University. Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab, which had monitored the siege using satellite imagery, identified 150 groups of objects consistent with human remains in the days following the city's capture — some burned, some buried by RSF fighters attempting to conceal evidence.
British MPs were subsequently briefed that 60,000 deaths is the low estimate for El Fasher alone. Around 500,000 people fled after the city fell. An estimated 200,000 were still trapped inside when it was captured. The fate of most remains unknown.
"I was born in El Fasher and the people who were murdered, raped, tortured, starved, and displaced are my friends, family, and neighbors. The people of El Fasher were intentionally surrounded, deprived of basic aid, and slaughtered."
— Omer Gamar-Eldin Ismail, Senior Adviser at Yale Humanitarian Research Lab & former Acting Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sudan (February 2026)
The fall of El Fasher was the culmination of an 18-month campaign of atrocities, siege warfare, and deliberate starvation. For a full chronological breakdown of RSF violence against civilians and the geopolitical catastrophe unfolding in Sudan:
The Fall of El Fasher: RSF Atrocities and Sudan's Most Brutal Humanitarian CatastropheThe Documented Crimes: Not Chaos, but a Deliberate Playbook
The RSF's tactics across Darfur follow a recognizable pattern — one consistent enough across different cities, different months, and different commanders to be understood only as policy. The template: military assault followed by house-to-house killings targeting adult males from non-Arab communities; mass rape deployed systematically as a weapon to destroy communal cohesion and terrorize survivors into flight; looting of hospitals, universities, and banks; burning of homes, mosques, libraries, and agricultural land.
Massacres in El Geneina, Misterei, and Ardamata share this same DNA. In November 2023, thousands of non-Arab civilians — mostly Masalit, Tama, and Erenga — were killed in the Ardamata massacre. The Abu Shouk and Zamzam refugee camps outside El Fasher were repeatedly attacked between April and August 2025, killing hundreds of people who had already been displaced by earlier violence. These are not isolated incidents by undisciplined fighters. The ICC's deputy prosecutor described the cumulative picture, in a January 2026 Security Council briefing, as a campaign of "widespread mass criminality" amounting to "collective torture."
Using Starvation as a Military Instrument
Perhaps the most chilling tactic has been the RSF's deliberate engineering of famine. Satellite data compiled by Yale HRL between March and June 2024 exposed a systematic pattern of razing agricultural communities surrounding El Fasher — burning fields, destroying livestock corrals, eliminating water boreholes — long before the final military assault on the city. This was not collateral damage. Cutting off a population's food supply over 18 months, then killing those who survived the siege, is the legal definition of using starvation as a weapon of war, an act classified as a war crime under the Rome Statute.
By September 2025, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification estimated that 21.2 million Sudanese — 45 percent of the country's entire population — faced acute food insecurity. Famine was formally declared in Darfur and Kordofan. This is the worst global hunger crisis since the 1980s, and every piece of evidence points to it being manufactured rather than inevitable.
Children and the Theft of a Generation
Ten million Sudanese children are currently out of school. Thousands have been forcibly conscripted as fighters. Schools across Darfur have been converted into military barracks or destroyed. The UNHCR reports that Sudan now hosts the world's largest displacement crisis on record, with roughly 14 million people — one in four Sudanese — forced from their homes. Children who survive carry psychological trauma that research from previous conflict zones suggests will manifest in mental health crises, educational deficits, and social instability for decades. A generation is being deliberately destroyed.
Who Finances, Arms, and Enables the RSF? Following the Money and the Weapons
The UAE: The Most Documented External Backer
No external actor has attracted more documented evidence of involvement than the United Arab Emirates. UN Panel of Experts reports have confirmed the flow of weapons from UAE territory to RSF-controlled bases in Chad via cargo aircraft. In March 2025, Sudan's government filed a formal complaint at the International Court of Justice accusing the UAE of complicity in genocide through material and financial support to the RSF. Seven Sudanese survivors separately filed communications with the ICC targeting senior Emirati business figures and officials over their documented role in funding RSF atrocities.
The mechanism is relatively straightforward. Emirati-linked companies purchase gold directly from RSF-controlled mining operations in Darfur — gold that requires mass displacement and forced labor to extract. That gold flows through Dubai, is refined and sold on international markets, and the profits cycle back as weapons, intelligence, and logistical support. Blood gold, laundered into respectable vaults. Sudan's mineral wealth funds the destruction of Sudan's people.
The geopolitical calculation behind Abu Dhabi's involvement is equally legible. A fractured, weakened Sudan offers the UAE several strategic prizes: a potential military footprint in western Sudan, strategic influence over Port Sudan's Red Sea access, leverage in the Horn of Africa against rival powers Turkey and Egypt, and — perhaps most importantly — the ability to prevent any future democratic Khartoum government from aligning with Qatar or other UAE rivals. Darfur is, from this perspective, a transaction. Which is precisely what makes it so obscene.
The UAE's role extends beyond arms deliveries. Our investigation examines the financial architecture that converts Emirati "development" money into a lifeline for RSF operations on the ground — and how Dubai became a hub for laundering Sudanese conflict gold:
From Dubai to Darfur: How Emirati Aid in Sudan Is Being Transformed into AmmunitionRussia and the Africa Corps Shadow
Russia's presence in Darfur operates through a different but complementary mechanism. The Wagner Group — restructured as the Africa Corps following Yevgeny Prigozhin's death in August 2023 — has maintained interests in Sudanese gold mining since at least 2017. Russian personnel provided early weapons and training to the RSF, and Russia has deployed its UN Security Council veto to block or dilute resolutions that might constrain RSF operations. For Moscow, a Sudan fragmented along the Libya model serves a consistent strategic template: secure extractive access to African resources, deny Western and Gulf competitors influence, and create a security dependency that translates into geopolitical leverage. The cost — Sudanese civilian lives — does not appear in the calculation.
The Open Border Problem: Libya and Chad
Arms, mercenaries, and supplies flow to the RSF through porous borders with both Libya and Chad. Libyan factions aligned with Khalifa Haftar — himself sustained by UAE support — have facilitated weapons transfers across the Sahel corridor. Chad, hosting more than 600,000 Sudanese refugees and facing enormous domestic strain, has struggled to police borders that were never designed for containment. The regional network feeding the RSF makes any arms embargo extraordinarily difficult without genuine multilateral enforcement — which, so far, has not materialized.
| Actor | Documented Role in the Conflict | Primary Strategic Motive |
|---|---|---|
| RSF / Hemedti | Direct perpetrator of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes across Darfur | Political power; control of gold, land & resources |
| UAE | Arms deliveries; gold purchasing; logistical support (UN-documented, ICJ complaint filed) | Red Sea foothold; Horn of Africa influence; block democratic Khartoum |
| Russia / Africa Corps | Weapons supply, military training, UN Security Council veto protection | Gold concessions; African proxy network; anti-Western leverage |
| Libya (Haftar factions) | Weapons transit corridor through Sahel routes | UAE proxy alignment; regional destabilization |
| International Community | Formal condemnations; inadequate sanctions enforcement; humanitarian funding gap of 72% | Economic interests in UAE; diplomatic paralysis |
Why the World Keeps Choosing Silence: The Economics of Impunity
The United States made a significant gesture on January 7, 2025: outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken formally determined that the RSF and its allied militias had committed genocide in Darfur — a legal designation that carries substantial political weight. The UN Fact-Finding Mission delivered its "Hallmarks of Genocide" report in February 2026. Following the report's release, foreign ministers from Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom announced a new accountability coalition. The ICC's deputy prosecutor briefed the Security Council on crimes of staggering scale. Drone strike data from the first five months of 2026 showed a 600 percent increase in drone-related deaths compared to 2024 — over 1,000 civilians killed in drone strikes alone.
And yet: the killing continues. Mediation efforts involving the Quad — the US, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt — have produced no meaningful ceasefire. Humanitarian access to Darfur remains catastrophically restricted. Sudan's humanitarian operation runs with a 72 percent funding deficit. The SAF has intensified its own drone strikes on RSF-held areas in Darfur and Kordofan, causing mass displacement from those regions. Both sides are committing crimes; but the RSF's against non-Arab communities meet the specific legal threshold of genocide.
The reason for international inertia is not mysterious. The UAE is a major economic partner of the United States, the United Kingdom, and most EU member states — a host to trillions in investment capital, a buyer of billions in Western weapons systems, and home to powerful commercial lobbies with access to the highest levels of government. No Western capital has been willing to fundamentally rupture that relationship over what happens to Darfuri civilians. It is an ugly calculation. But it is the calculation being made, implicitly, every day that serious pressure on Abu Dhabi is withheld.
"States must target and sanction the RSF's leadership and supply line — as well as the group's powerful enablers abroad. All options must be on the table to protect civilians and fulfill the promise of 'never again.'"
— Mutasim Ali & Yonah Diamond, legal experts, Foreign Policy, November 2025
What Genuine Accountability Would Actually Require
International justice for Darfur has failed before — spectacularly. Omar al-Bashir was indicted by the ICC in 2009 for genocide related to the first Darfur crisis. He remained in power for another decade, traveled freely to signatory states that ignored their arrest obligations, and as of early 2026 has still not been transferred to The Hague. That history of impunity is not a footnote — it is a direct cause of why a second genocide in the same region became possible. When perpetrators observe zero consequences, they plan accordingly.
For accountability to be more than symbolic this time around, it requires several interlocking actions: targeted sanctions on RSF leadership and their Emirati enablers with genuine asset freezes and travel bans that actually bite; an enforceable arms embargo backed by real border monitoring rather than declarations; ICC arrest warrants pursued diplomatically rather than shelved for political convenience; and sustained pressure on the UAE from governments that actually hold economic leverage over Abu Dhabi — not just from human rights organizations that Abu Dhabi can safely ignore.
Sudan's people are not passive in this. Resistance committees, diaspora advocacy networks, and civilian self-organization structures have maintained extraordinary pressure despite everything working against them. Some young Sudanese who once protested the military have taken up arms against the RSF — not out of enthusiasm for the SAF, but because they identify the RSF as an existential threat to Sudan's survival as a unified, multiethnic state. That resilience is real and remarkable. What it is waiting for is any serious international will to match it.
The world declared "never again" after Rwanda. Then it watched Darfur burn in 2003. Then it looked away while Darfur burned again in 2023. How many times can a phrase survive what it failed to prevent?
Sources & References
- UN Independent Fact-Finding Mission — "Hallmarks of Genocide in El-Fasher" (February 2026, OHCHR)
- UN News: Tens of thousands fleeing El Fasher amid RSF atrocities (October 2025)
- Yale School of Public Health — Humanitarian Research Lab: Genocide findings & satellite evidence (February 2026)
- Council on Foreign Relations — Global Conflict Tracker: Sudan Civil War (updated May 2026)
- Al Jazeera: Tracking Sudan's Humanitarian Crisis — By the Numbers (December 2025)
- US Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia — Darfur: Historical Context and 2023–2026 Crisis
- Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect — Sudan Situation Report (2026)
- Just Security: New Evidence of RSF Starvation Crimes in Darfur (March 2026)