Statement by the Sudan Taskforce for Accountability and Justice 

15 April 2025

Two years after the outbreak of war in Sudan, the people of Sudan are still experiencing an untenable crisis. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) continues to commit genocidal violence against civilians in attacks on cities, villages, and internally displaced persons (IDP) camps while the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) continues to perpetrate deadly airstrikes against civilians and civilian infrastructure and to withhold desperately needed aid.

This weekend, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) killed hundreds of men, women and children in the famine-stricken Zamzam IDP camp near El-Fasher in North Darfur State. According to the UN, 60,000–80,000 entire households were displaced by the attack, and are suffering advanced dehydration and exhaustion.

After weeks of heavy shelling, gunfire, and mass executions of civilians, the RSF, led by its internationally-sanctioned commander Abdelrahim Dagalo, and armed and financed by the UAE, has seized the camp sheltering over half a million people. Emerging open-source investigative evidence shows an attempt by the RSF to raze the camp to the ground.

There are clear signs the attack was designed to trap civilians in deadly conditions.  The RSF: 

• closed all roads out of the camp;
• executed doctors, children, and humanitarian workers;
• entered a safety bunker and shot nine life-saving aid workers in the head and chest.

The Sudan Taskforce for Accountability and Justice, a global coalition currently composed of eleven organisations and independent lawyers, calls on:

1. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) to issue emergency measures ordering the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to stop arming and financing the RSF and to do everything in its power to end the genocide. The catastrophe unfolding right now in Zamzam is precisely the kind of urgent situation that emergency measures are designed to address.While the hundreds already killed in Zamzam cannot be saved, such an order would send a powerful message to the RSF and its enablers, and could save lives in El Fasher and Abu Shuk camp, where the RSF is expanding their attack.
   Of the foreign states and actors fueling these atrocities with weapons and finances, the UAE is the most complicit for arming, financing, and exercising a significant degree of control over the RSF.
2. The international community to fulfill its moral and legal obligations to prevent and punish the perpetrators of the ongoing atrocities in North Darfur.
3. The international community to mobilize immediate humanitarian assistance to those in need within and around El Fasher. 
4. UN Representatives and diplomats to hold the RSF accountable for their failure to comply with UN Security Council Resolution 2736, which urges the RSF to end the siege on El Fasher.
5. The United Nations Security Council to convene an emergency session and adopt a binding resolution under Chapter VII of the UN Charter to bring an immediate end to the assault and siege on El Fasher and the surrounding displaced persons’ camps. The resolution should also call upon all UN member states to refrain from any actions that may hinder this effort, under penalty of international sanctions on states, entities, and individuals found to be in violation.
6. Furthermore, the UN Secretary-General is specifically urged to invoke his authority under Article 99 of the Charter to formally bring this matter to the Security Council’s attention and prompt decisive action.

The RSF’s attacks on IDP camps represent another episode of ethnically-motivated atrocities that started with the Masalit in West Darfur and are currently targeting Fur, Zaghawa, and other non-Arab groups in North Darfur. According to reports, the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have killed at least one hundred and fifty thousandpeople, displaced over twelve million, and put thirty million in need of humanitarian aid in their two years of war in Sudan.

The RSF has also perpetrated systematic sexual violence across Sudan that has left countless women and girls, men and boys raped, not evensparing infants.

El Fasher has been under siege for over a year. By May, close to 6 in 10 people in El Fasher are projected to face acute food insecurity, including half a million suffering from famine or emergency level classification by the international famine review committee.

The shelling and targeting of medical workers already forced Doctors Without Borders out of Zamzam in February. There is simply nowhere near the medical emergency response required to meet the overwhelming and escalating needs on the ground. 

One resident of the camp said, “[n]othing [was] left in Zamzam… death is everywhere.”

Immediate action must be taken to prevent further loss of life.

Sudan Taskforce for Accountability and Justice

https://www.raoulwallenbergcentre.org/en/staj