Sudan's genocide got a UN label. The world gave the RSF weapons instead.

In February, a UN fact-finding mission did something governments spend enormous energy avoiding: it used the word genocide. Investigating the Rapid Support Forces' October 2025 seizure of El Fasher, the mission concluded the killings of Zaghawa and Fur civilians bore "the hallmarks of genocide" — mass killings, ethnically selective sexual violence, enforced disappearance, all preceded by an 18-month siege that starved the city before the RSF ever breached it. Investigators said RSF fighters were recorded asking crowds if anyone among them was Zaghawa, promising to kill them if so. That's not fog-of-war chaos. That's a list.

El Fasher had held out longer than any other city in Sudan's civil war, the Sudanese army's last position in Darfur, a shelter for a quarter million people who had nowhere else to go. The RSF built a 56-kilometre earthen berm around it to make sure nothing — food, medicine, people — got out. When the siege finally gave way at the end of October, UN agencies counted tens of thousands dead within days, satellite imagery showing patches of reddish-brown soil at human-body scale along the berm where witnesses say people were rounded up and shot trying to flee.

None of this is unprecedented, which is the point. The RSF are the descendants of the Janjaweed, the militias that carried out the Darfur genocide of the 2000s under Omar al-Bashir — armed, trained, and later formalized into a paramilitary force by the same state that once denied what they were doing. Twenty years later the ethnic logic is identical, the geography is identical, and once again the perpetrators are backed by outside patrons who face no consequences for it. The UAE has been repeatedly and credibly named as the RSF's main external backer — supplying arms through routes across Chad and Libya — and continues to deny it while facing no sanctions, no arms embargo enforcement, nothing beyond diplomatic irritation.

This is the shape of the thing every time: international bodies produce meticulous documentation, name individual commanders, use the heaviest legal word available — and the machinery that fuels the killing keeps running because the states supplying it are trade partners, arms buyers, or simply too useful to isolate. The UK foreign secretary called the findings "truly horrific" and promised to raise them at the Security Council. Raising it is not stopping it. Sudan's displacement numbers show what "raising it" actually delivers: still-elevated levels three years into a war the world agreed a while ago to just watch.

There's no anarchist novelty in the following sentence, but it needs saying anyway: naming a genocide is not a policy, it's a press release. The people who get free from sieges like El Fasher's are freed by resistance committees, aid smugglers, and each other — the same local self-organization the state and its patrons spent 18 months trying to starve out. Solidarity with Sudan means backing that infrastructure directly, not waiting on the states arming both sides of the war to hold themselves accountable.

Sources

UN Fact-Finding Mission report summary, Darfur Women Action Group
BBC via BusinessGhana: UN says Sudan atrocities are 'hallmarks of genocide'
Newsclick: Bloodbath Visible From Space — RSF's Massacres in El Fasher
IOM DTM: Sudan Crisis — Three Years of Conflict and Displacement
Wikipedia: El Fasher massacre