Genocide committed by RSF militia in Sudan’s raging civil war, says US Secretary of State Antony Blinken

The US government has determined that members of the RSF paramilitary forces and their allied militias in Sudan committed genocide, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Tuesday. The “Rapid Support Forces” and their allies are one party in a largely hidden but a vicious civil war which took tens of thousands of lives in less than two years.

In a statement announcing the US determination that genocide had been committed – and new sanctions imposed as a result – Blinken called it “a conflict of unmitigated brutality that has resulted in the world’s worst humanitarian disaster”.

Blinken announced sanctions against RSF leader Mohammad Hamdan Dagl Mousa, also known as Hemedti, as well as seven RSF-related 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 are barred from entering the United States.

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-affiliated militias continued to target civilians. The RSF and allied militias systematically killed 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” said Blinken. “Those same militias targeted fleeing civilians, killing innocent people fleeing the conflict and preventing remaining civilians from accessing life-saving supplies.”

In May 2024, Human Rights Watch told the RSF and its allies could be guilty of genocide against non-Arab ethnic communities due to a certain series of attacks in the western region of Darfur. Since then, the RSF has been widely accused of ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and war crimes war broke out.

The International Criminal Court is investigating ethnic killings in Darfur and said it has “reasons to believe” that both paramilitaries and the Sudanese army have committed unspecified “crimes under the Rome Statute”, which include war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The ICC 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 leading the country. The former allies in charge of the OS and the RSF negotiated the full integration of the RSF into the army before the formation of a new transitional government. Those negotiations were interrupted and the two sides went to war.

After the war broke out, the US government, along with international partners, tried unsuccessfully to broker a peace agreement.

Journalists and aid officials are largely banned from traveling to the country to report firsthand on the conflict, but independent researchers say the war’s death toll is largely unreported.

According to a study published in November by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, an estimated 61,000 people were killed between April 2023 and June 2024 in Khartoum state alone, home to the capital of the same name.

The study found that more than 90% of these deaths went unreported, but the estimated number was significantly higher than previously believed.

“Our findings reveal the serious and largely invisible impact of war on the lives of Sudanese people, particularly preventable diseases and starvation,” said the report’s lead author, Dr. Maysoon Dahab, adding that the “enormous level of killings” in the Central Kordofan and West Darfur regions “point to wars within wars”.

“Today’s action is part of our continuing efforts to promote accountability for all belligerents whose actions fuel this conflict,” Blinken said Tuesday. “The United States is not supporting either side in this war.”

What is genocide?

The United Nations adopted Genocide Convention 1948 after the holocaust committed by Nazi Germany. It defines genocide as any of a series of acts, “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”. These works include:

• Killing group members.
• Causing severe physical or mental harm to members of the group.
• Deliberate imposition on a group of living conditions calculated for its complete or partial physical destruction.
• Imposing measures to prevent births within the group.
• Forced transfer of children from one group to another.