The United Nations said in a report on Thursday that foreign networks are helping fuel the brutal war in Sudan that has raged between the army and the paramilitary group Rapid Security Forces since 2023, killing at least 59,000 people, displacing some 13 million and pushing many parts of the African nation into famine.

It said a network of companies based abroad had supplied military contractors, weapons and training to the RSF.

“The mission finds reasonable grounds to believe that a transnational network supplied the Rapid Support Forces with weapons, logistics, training and foreign personnel, including contractors involved in advanced weapons and drone systems,” according to a summary of the investigation by Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

It found that individuals based abroad played a "significant role in networks involved in the recruitment, financing, transportation and deployment of foreign military contractors and the provision of military-related support benefiting the Rapid Support Forces.”

The investigators called for the UN Security Council to extend its arms embargo on Sudan.

“The weapons, financing, personnel and technology that sustain this war must be constrained,” it said.

They also linked foreign-trained fighters to two massacres in 2025 in Zamzam camp and El Fasher.

Survivors among the more than 100,000 people who fled Al Fasher reported RSF fighters gunning down civilians in homes and in the streets, leaving the city littered with bodies. Satellite photos have since appeared to show RSF disposing of bodies in mass graves or by burning them.