This report documents the Rapid Support Forces’ (RSF’s) violent takeover of El Fasher, the capital of Sudan’s North Darfur state, and the devastating toll of that campaign on the city’s children and civilians. It examines the RSF’s destruction of villages and displacement camps around El Fasher, its nearly 18-month siege and starvation of the city, and the massacres, sexual violence, hostage-taking and mass detention that accompanied the city’s fall in October 2025, alongside the recruitment and use of children as fighters. It analyses the RSF’s pattern of targeting Zaghawa and other non-Arab communities through dehumanizing ethnic slurs and the deliberate destruction of villages in the Abu Zerega area, sustained throughout by a steady flow of weapons from foreign backers, chiefly the United Arab Emirates. It concludes that the RSF has committed war crimes including murder, torture, rape and hostage-taking, and the crimes against humanity of murder, extermination, forcible transfer, imprisonment, sexual slavery and persecution, finding that its destruction of Zaghawa villages in Abu Zerega is consistent with a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing.
A stand-alone executive summary is available in English, click here to access.
