A "campaign of destruction" in October by Sudanese rebels against communities in and near a city in Sudan's western region of Darfur shows “hallmarks of genocide", UN-backed human rights experts reported Thursday, a dramatic finding in the country's devastating conflict.

The Rapid Support Forces carried out mass killings and other atrocities in Al Fasher after an 18-month siege during which they imposed conditions “calculated to bring about the physical destruction" of communities, in particular the Zaghawa and the Fur communities, the independent fact-finding mission on Sudan reported.

UN officials say several thousand civilians were killed in the RSF takeover of Al Fasher, the Sudanese army’s only remaining stronghold in Darfur. Only 40% of the city’s 260,000 residents managed to flee the onslaught alive, thousands of whom were wounded, the officials said. The fate of the rest remains unknown.

Sudan plunged into conflict in mid-April 2023, when long-simmering tensions between its military and paramilitary leaders broke out in the capital Khartoum and spread to other regions, including Darfur.

Murderous rampage

The conflict has killed more than 40,000 people, according to UN figures, but aid groups say that is an undercount and the true number could be many times higher.

The RSF and their allied militias, known as Janjaweed, overran Al Fasher on Oct. 26 and rampaged through the city. The offensive was marked by widespread atrocities that included mass killings and summary executions, sexual violence, torture, and abductions for ransom, according to the UN Human Rights Office.

They killed more than 6,000 people between Oct. 25 and Oct. 27 in the city, the office said. Ahead of the attack, the rebels ran riot in the Abu Shouk displacement camp, just outside of the city, and killed at least 300 people in two days, it said.

An international convention known colloquially as the “Genocide Convention” sets out five criteria to assess whether genocide has taken place.

Genocide criteria

They are: killing members of a group; causing its members serious bodily or mental harm; imposing measures aimed to prevent births in the group; deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to bring about the “physical destruction” of the group; and forcibly transferring its children to another group.

The fact-finding team says at least 3 of the criteria for genocide were met in Al Fasher. Under the convention, a genocide determination could be made even if only one of the five criteria were met.

The RSF acts in Al Fasher included killing members of a protected ethnic group; causing serious bodily and mental harm; and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction in whole or in part — all core elements of the crime of genocide under international law, according to the fact-finding team.

The report cited a systematic pattern of ethnically targeted killings, sexual violence and destruction and public statements explicitly calling for the elimination of certain communities.

‘Planned operations’

The violence ‘not random’ excesses of war, says Team chair Mohamed Chande Othman, a former chief justice of Tanzania, “but pointed to a planned and organized operation that bore the characteristics of genocide.”

Al Fasher's residents were "physically exhausted, malnourished, and in part unable to flee, leaving them defenseless against the extreme violence that followed,” the team's report said. “Thousands of persons, particularly the Zaghawa, were killed, raped, or disappeared during three days of absolute horror.”

The fact-finding mission pointed to mass killings, widespread rape, sexual violence, torture and cruel treatment, arbitrary detention, extortion, and enforced disappearances during RSF's takeover of Al Fasher in late October.

The report documented cases of survivors quoting its fighters as saying things like: “Is there anyone Zaghawa among you? If we find Zaghawa, we will kill them all,” and “We want to eliminate anything black from Darfur.”

Accountability

The report pointed to “selective targeting” of Zaghawa and Fur women and girls.

The fact-finding team was created in 2023 by the Geneva-based Human Rights Council, the UN's leading human rights body, which has 47 member countries drawn from the world body's membership.

The team called for accountability for perpetrators and warned that protection of civilians is needed “more than ever”.

The RSF grew out of the Janjaweed militias, who became notorious for atrocities in the early 2000s in a ruthless campaign against people identifying as East or Central African in Darfur. That campaign killed some 300,000 people and drove 2.7 million from their homes