An international human rights organisation is now calling for the deployment of an international force to protect civilians from the atrocities of the Sudanese rebels. 

In a new report released on July 1 entitled City Under Siege, Children Under Fire, Amnesty International says that the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) committed crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing during its campaign to seize El Fasher in North Darfur state in Sudan.

The report documents how civilians in and around El Fasher were killed, injured, beaten, tortured and detained between early 2024 and October 2025 as the RSF fought the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and allied Joint Forces in a war that devastated North Darfur. 

Children are the main target of the atrocities. The RSF’s crimes included murder, forcible transfer, imprisonment, torture, rape, sexual slavery, other forms of sexual violence, enslavement, extermination and persecution. Throughout assaults on North Darfur, the RSF routinely used terms like falangay, indicating slavery or servitude, during attacks on civilians of non-Arab ethnicity.

“The war in Sudan is a war on civilians. The world was warned of the horrors that civilians in El Fasher confronted as the RSF laid siege to the city. It is a stain on the conscience of humanity,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.

Children were not collateral damage of this violence – often, they were deliberately targeted and suffered immensely. They have been killed, injured, raped, abducted, and forcibly recruited on a massive scale.

 Amnesty International says an independent and adequately resourced international force must be deployed to Sudan to protect civilians against crimes by all parties to the conflict, which has now gone on for three years and three months since it began in April 2023.  

“Without urgent action from the international community, attacks on civilians – and the immense suffering and trauma being inflicted on children – will continue unhindered,” says Ms Callamard. 

Amnesty International interviewed 247 people for the report, including 208 survivors (169 adults and 39 children) who experienced or witnessed conflict-related abuses. The report also includes open-source analysis, including 89 videos and extensive satellite imagery analysis from North Darfur.

The organisation says it sent a letter to General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, head of the RSF, documenting the report’s findings on June 10, 2026 nut no response had been received at the time of publication.  Amnesty believes that acts documented in this report, as well as other suspected crimes under parallel investigation, point to the crime of genocide. 

Siege warfare 

By November 2023, the RSF controlled four out of five state capitals in Darfur. El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, was the lone holdout. Beginning in 2024, the RSF systematically attacked the villages, towns, and displacement camps surrounding El Fasher, targeting residents with violence and pillaging and burning civilian infrastructure.

Many of these communities were predominantly from the Zaghawa ethnic group. During attacks, RSF fighters burned civilian homes long after residents had fled, suggesting an intent to render the areas uninhabitable. 

These actions, combined with the RSF’s continued control of these areas, preventing displaced populations from returning, are consistent with the ethnic cleansing of the Zaghawa people from areas near El Fasher.

Yagoub, a 17-year-old Zaghawa boy, was at his family farm near Abu Zerega, a town 35km south of El Fasher, when the RSF attacked in December 2024. He tried to flee but was captured by the RSF. He told Amnesty International. 

“They tied me up and beat me with sticks and the back of an AK-47. Then one of them approached on the back of a camel and said, ‘This is the child of a falangay’… And he just shot me in the leg. Yagoub now uses crutches to walk. Eight of his cousins, including four boys aged between 11 and 17, were killed in the same attack.

With residents forcibly displaced from the villages around El Fasher, the RSF maintained a brutal siege on the city from May 2024 to October 2025, restricting the entry of food and humanitarian supplies, and shelling the city on a near-daily basis. 

Famine spread, forcing people to eat ambaz, a byproduct of peanut oil production normally used as animal feed. All civilians, but particularly children – on whom disease and malnutrition can have irreversible effects – bore the brunt of this manufactured famine. 

Women described giving birth amid severe deprivation and stress, in sweltering underground bomb shelters, in hospitals that were shelled or while fleeing violence. 

Unable to get adequate nutrition themselves, they often could not produce enough milk to feed their newborns. With no safe alternatives, many women watched their babies waste away.

Rashida, a 39-year-old woman, lost her youngest child, a one-year-old twin in August 2025. She said: “My son was getting very weak and not taking milk. He became very thin.”

On October 26, 2025, the RSF waged its final offensive on El Fasher. When civilians attempted to flee, they encountered a 57km network of berms. A massacre followed: hundreds were executed, and many others were tortured or detained.

Amnesty International interviewed 70 survivors, almost all of whom witnessed executions, rape, other torture or hostage-taking. One 58-year-old woman estimated she saw more than 1,000 dead bodies: “The people who were shot were thrown inside the berm… The RSF said they would fill in the berm with the bodies.”

Many children were among those killed at the berm. Taiseer, a 68-year-old Zaghawa woman fleeing with her five grandchildren, saw the RSF shoot and kill a 12-year-old boy who was accompanying them.

 Zubeida, a 15-year-old girl, survived a massacre of approximately 25 people at the berm only because she identified herself as half Arab and falsely claimed that her father was in the RSF. She witnessed the execution of men and boys, the killing of women who resisted rape, and the shooting of young children. She said: “I am the only survivor.”

Those who remained in El Fasher witnessed horrific violations. Amnesty International interviewed 18 people who were present at Saudi Maternity Hospital, including staff, patients and relatives of patients, who saw the RSF kill scores of people there. Attacking the Saudi Maternity Hospital, a protected object under international law, is a war crime.

Sexual violence

The RSF raped and committed other forms of sexual violence on a massive scale across many settings. Amnesty International interviewed 26 survivors of sexual violence, including 20 female survivors of rape, among them three girls under the age of 18 and one young woman raped when she was 17. Survivors described being subjected to severe humiliation and abuse that left lasting physical and psychological harm.

Tasneem, a 13-year-old Zaghawa girl, was abducted in early April 2025 when RSF fighters attacked her village west of El Fasher. Tasneem was herding the family’s livestock with her father when RSF fighters approached. Tasneem watched the RSF shoot her father dead, before she was abducted and transported to El Daein, approximately 350km away. 

She told Amnesty International: “The first time I was raped] it was three people. I was blindfolded… They held me down… They said this is happening to you because your boys fought us, boys of the falangayat.”