Nineteen Videos, One Massacre: Amnesty's Case Against the RSF in El Fasher

On June 10, 2026, Amnesty International sent a letter to General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo — known as Hemedti, commander of Sudan's Rapid Support Forces — laying out the findings of an investigation it would publish three weeks later. The report, released in early July under the title "A Stain on the Conscience of Humanity," concludes that the RSF's campaign to seize El Fasher, the last major city in Darfur still under government control until it fell on October 26, 2025, amounted to crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. Some of the conduct documented, Amnesty says, may also be relevant to the crime of genocide. "These are crimes that should shock the conscience of humanity," said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International's Secretary General, in a statement accompanying the report. "Children have been deliberately targeted — killed, injured, raped, abducted and forcibly recruited on a massive scale."

The report covers events between early 2024 and October 2025 — the period during which the RSF tightened an 18-month siege around El Fasher before storming the city. Researchers documented a pattern: villages, towns and displacement camps in the area surrounding El Fasher were systematically attacked, their residents subjected to violence and pillaging, their infrastructure burned. The crimes catalogued in the report include murder, forcible transfer, unlawful imprisonment, torture, rape, sexual slavery, other forms of sexual violence, enslavement, extermination and persecution — the constituent acts of crimes against humanity under international law, applied here to a single, geographically concentrated military campaign.

Forty-Five Testimonies, Nineteen Videos

Amnesty's evidence base combines survivor testimony with open-source verification. Researchers interviewed 45 people who had been unlawfully detained by the RSF — including eight children — across detentions that occurred between July 2024 and January 2026. Conditions described were abusive and degrading: boys as young as 13 were beaten and verbally abused with ethnic slurs, denied adequate food and water, and held in sweltering, overcrowded rooms where, according to multiple accounts, other detainees died from dehydration or disease before they could be released or escape.

Separately, Amnesty collected and forensically verified 19 videos depicting mass executions. One set of footage documents a large massacre near a stretch of raised earth known locally as "the berm," roughly 12 kilometres northwest of El Fasher — a location that has recurred across multiple independent reports of mass killings during the city's fall. Nine of the 19 videos show an RSF commander identified as Al-Fateh Abdullah Idris personally executing captives who were dressed in civilian clothing. Amnesty's analysis of who was targeted — disproportionately members of non-Arab communities in and around El Fasher — supports a conclusion of persecution based on ethnic identity, which the organisation states may be legally relevant to genocide, a determination that requires proof of specific intent to destroy a group in whole or in part. A separate, parallel investigation by the UN's Fact-Finding Mission on Sudan has been examining many of the same events.

What Amnesty Is Asking For

The report's recommendations are aimed less at documentation — which Amnesty regards as largely complete for this phase of the conflict — than at the international response that has so far failed to follow it. Amnesty is calling on the UN Security Council to expand the existing arms embargo, which currently covers Darfur alone, to all of Sudan, on the grounds that weapons reaching the RSF through other entry points have sustained the same campaign the embargo was meant to constrain. The organisation has also renewed its call for the United Arab Emirates to halt arms transfers to the RSF — a long-standing allegation that the UAE has consistently denied — and states that, absent that change, international transfers of arms to the UAE itself should stop. On accountability, Amnesty is urging governments to fund and protect the mandates of the existing mechanisms already examining Sudan: the UN Fact-Finding Mission and the International Criminal Court, which has held jurisdiction over Darfur since the UN Security Council referred the situation there in 2005, during an earlier wave of mass atrocities in the same region.

The City Fell, the Displacement Didn't Stop

El Fasher's capture closed an 18-month siege that, by the accounts of aid agencies operating in the region, cut residents off from food, medicine and clean water long before the city's final fall. The humanitarian consequences did not end with the siege; they continue to compound it. OCHA reports that nearly 15,000 people have arrived in Tawila, a town roughly 60 kilometres west of El Fasher, in recent weeks alone — newcomers straining a host community that was already absorbing waves of displacement from the broader Darfur crisis. Across Sudan as a whole, 33.7 million people now require humanitarian assistance in 2026, the highest figure of any country in the world and an increase of 3.3 million people from 2025, according to OCHA's Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan. The UN's relief chief has called specifically for the protection of civilians still in and around El Fasher and for unimpeded access to reach them, language that echoes appeals issued throughout the siege and that, by Amnesty's account, went largely unheeded while the city was still under attack.

That gap — between documented atrocity and enforceable consequence — is the throughline of Amnesty's report. Sudan's conflict, now in its fourth year since fighting broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF in April 2023, has produced a familiar cycle in Darfur specifically: a region with a documented history of genocide investigations dating to the early 2000s, now generating a new body of video and testimonial evidence describing strikingly similar conduct two decades later. The ICC's Darfur jurisdiction has existed for as long as some of the report's youngest detained witnesses have been alive, and it has not yet produced a conviction connected to the current war. Whether the nineteen videos, the forty-five testimonies and the renewed call for a nationwide arms embargo change that trajectory is, as of this report's publication, still an open question — one that will be answered less in legal filings than in whether the Security Council and the arms-exporting states named in the report alter their conduct.