NAIROBI — The woman was 58 years old, and she walked through El Fasher after the Rapid Support Forces had finished. What she counted was nearly a thousand bodies, including children. Her testimony is one of 246 gathered by Amnesty International for a report released Tuesday that makes the most comprehensive documented case yet that what happened in Sudan’s last major Darfur city was not the disorder of war but the deliberate targeting of an ethnic group for extinction.
The report covers the RSF’s siege of El Fasher from May 2024 to October 2025, culminating in a final offensive Amnesty’s investigators say resulted in hundreds executed, many tortured or detained. The organization has submitted its findings to the International Criminal Court and is pressing for an immediate nationwide ceasefire and the deployment of an independent international protection force, a call it has made repeatedly to governments that have not answered.
“The RSF and its allied militias committed murder, torture, rape, sexual slavery, extermination, and persecution against the Zaghawa,” Agnes Callamard, Amnesty’s secretary-general, said in a statement accompanying the report. The Zaghawa are an ethnic group spanning the Sudan-Chad border, historically linked to armed resistance against Khartoum-aligned forces. Amnesty’s characterization is direct: what occurred in El Fasher was ethnic cleansing, conducted not against combatants but against a community the RSF and its commanders appear to have marked for elimination.
The siege did not begin with bullets. Residents of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur and the only major city in the Darfur region that the Sudan Armed Forces had managed to hold against the RSF advance, described watching food, medicine, and basic supplies cut off month by month as the encirclement tightened. By the depths of the siege, survivors told Amnesty’s investigators, residents had been reduced to eating ambaz, the oily residue left behind when peanut oil is extracted from animal feed. Not fit for human consumption under ordinary conditions, ambaz became the food of a city being starved into submission.
That starvation was not a side effect of military operations. Amnesty’s report frames it as a method, placing it alongside mass killings, sexual violence used as a weapon, and the systematic detention of Zaghawa men and boys. Read together, the findings describe a campaign directed not at military opponents but at an ethnic community targeted for removal from the city.
The October 2025 offensive was the final act. Amnesty’s investigators describe a rupture, the moment when whatever restraint had moderated the violence dissolved entirely. Eyewitness accounts gathered from 208 survivors, including 39 children, describe mass executions of men taken from their homes, women subjected to sexual violence in detention, and the systematic destruction of properties tied to the Zaghawa. The 58-year-old witness who spoke to investigators did not offer her name. She counted what she saw.
El Fasher had been under sustained pressure long before October. A UN fact-finding mission had earlier concluded that the RSF’s conduct in the city bore “hallmarks of genocide,” a phrase that international bodies use sparingly and deliberately. The UN mission’s findings and Amnesty’s new report now sit in parallel, each produced independently, each reaching the same underlying conclusion through different evidentiary paths. The RSF has not responded to Amnesty’s findings as of publication.
Sudan’s war began in April 2023 when the RSF and the Sudan Armed Forces, long allied partners in military governance, turned against each other in a power struggle that rapidly consumed the country. The conflict has displaced approximately 14 million people, one of the largest displacement crises on earth. In North Darfur alone, the siege of El Fasher trapped civilians inside a city that outside organizations were unable to reach. A World Health Organization emergency declared this week confirmed that a cholera outbreak in West Kordofan was already spreading beyond the capacity of any response team to contain, compounding the crises driven by years of active fighting.
Darfur carries its own particular history in conflicts of this kind. The Janjaweed militias that committed mass atrocities against Darfuri communities in the early 2000s, prompting the first genocide prosecution at the International Criminal Court, share direct organizational lineage with the RSF. Many of the same commanders, the same recruitment networks, the same methods of targeting civilian populations by ethnic identity: what Amnesty documented in El Fasher follows a template that international courts have already examined and named.
Callamard’s call for an international protection force is not new. The African Union, multiple UN agencies, and human rights groups have pressed for such a deployment since the early months of the war. What has not followed is Security Council authorization, where vetoes and bloc opposition have consistently blocked measures that would impose international oversight on Sudan’s warring parties. Whether Tuesday’s report changes those calculations is, as of its publication, an open question. The record of the past sixteen months does not suggest urgency will now arrive where it failed to before.
The 208 survivors who spoke to Amnesty’s investigators described their experiences in their own words, from third countries they had reached by fleeing. Among those accounts are witnesses who watched neighbors taken from their homes, who hid while executions continued outside, who crossed into Chad or Egypt or reached Kenya with nothing except the weight of what they had witnessed. Al Jazeera reported on the findings as they were released. Earlier, an RSF drone strike on a funeral gathering in Kordofan killed 23 people, a glimpse of the pattern of civilian targeting that Amnesty’s El Fasher findings now extend and document in far greater depth.
What happened in El Fasher after October 2025 is not yet fully known. Amnesty’s investigators could not access the city directly; testimony was gathered from survivors who had already fled. The city that the report describes at such cost remains closed to independent observers. The international force Callamard is calling for has not been authorized. The ceasefire has not been agreed. The report establishes a record of what occurred. What follows from it is still in the hands of governments and institutions that watched the siege run for sixteen months without intervening.
