The U.S. government has determined that genocide has been committed by members of the RSF paramilitary force and its allied militias in Sudan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday. The “Rapid Support Forces” and its allies are one side in a largely hidden but vicious civil war that has claimed tens of thousands of lives in less than two years.
In a statement announcing the U.S. determination that genocide was committed — and that new sanctions were being imposed as a result — Blinken called it a “conflict of unmitigated brutality that has resulted in the world’s largest humanitarian catastrophe.”
Blinken announced sanctions against RSF leader Mohammad Hamdan Daglo Mousa, also known as Hemedti, as well as seven RSF-linked companies based in the United Arab Emirates and an individual accused of helping the RSF procure weapons. As part of the sanctions, Hemedti and his family were barred from entering the United States.
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The war has left “638,000 Sudanese experiencing the worst famine in Sudan’s recent history, over 30 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, and tens of thousands dead,” Blinken said.
“The RSF and RSF-aligned militias have continued to direct attacks against civilians. The RSF and allied militias have systematically murdered men and boys — even infants — on an ethnic basis, and deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence,” Blinken said. “Those same militias have targeted fleeing civilians, murdering innocent people escaping conflict, and prevented remaining civilians from accessing lifesaving supplies.”
In May 2024, the Human Rights Watch organization said the RSF and its allies could have been guilty of genocide against non-Arab ethnic communities over a specific series of attacks in the western region of Darfur. The RSF has been widely accused of ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and war crimes since the war broke out.
The International Criminal Court has been investigating ethnic-based killings in Darfur and has said it has “grounds to believe” that both the paramilitaries and the Sudanese army have committed unspecified “Rome Statute crimes,” which include war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The ICC’s investigation continues.
Why is there a civil war in Sudan?
Fighting broke out in Sudan between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF in April 2023 after months of tension between the two top generals who had been running the country. The former allies in charge of the SAF and the RSF had been negotiating to fully integrate the RSF into the army before the formation of a new transitional government. Those negotiations broke down and the two sides went to war.
After war broke out, the U.S. government, along with international partners, unsuccessfully tried to broker a peace agreement.
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Journalists and aid officials have largely been blocked from traveling to the country to report on the conflict first-hand, but independent researchers say the number of deaths from the war has been vastly unreported.
According to a study published in November by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, an estimated 61,000 people were killed in Khartoum State alone, home to the capital city of the same name, between April 2023 and June 2024.
The study found that more than 90% of those deaths went unrecorded, but the estimated toll was considerably higher than previously believed.
“Our findings reveal the severe and largely invisible impact of the war on Sudanese lives, especially of preventable disease and starvation, said the report’s lead author Dr. Maysoon Dahab, adding that “the overwhelming level of killings” in the central Kordofan and western Darfur regions “indicate wars within a war.”
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“Today’s action is part of our continued efforts to promote accountability for all warring parties whose actions fuel this conflict,” Blinken said Tuesday. “The United States does not support either side of this war.”
What is genocide?
The United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention in 1948 after the Holocaust committed by Nazi Germany. In it, genocide is defined as any one of a series of acts, “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” Those acts include:
- Killing members of the group.
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
