The Human Rights Watch NGO has published a report alleging that Sudanese paramilitary forces killed, abused and targeted people with disabilities during and after their takeover of el-Fasher, calling it the first time it had documented potential war crimes of “this type and scale.”ย
The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary has been fighting a civil war against the Sudanese military since 2023 and controls most of the western half of the country around Darfur .ย
El-Fasher, the capital of the North Darfur region, was among the last major non-RSF strongholds in the westย before it fell to RSF troops last October. The takeover was followed by reports of mass killings, lootings and rapeย as thousands fled the city, often to nearby Tawila.
Why did the RSF allegedly treat wounded young men as enemy combatants?ย
HRW said the RSF was particularly targeting younger wounded men, accusing them of being former combatants.
“The Rapid Support Forces treated people with disabilities as suspects, burdens or expendable,” Emina Cerimovic, associate disability rights director at HRW, said. “We heard how they accused some victims, particularly those missing a limb, of being injured fighters and summarily executed them.”ย
The study told the account of a 33-year-old man who used crutches after sustaining wounds in an explosive weapon attack. He said the RSF “considered everybody who was missing a hand or a limb to be a soldier,” and used factors like skin color and accent to determine whether they were likely to have fought for the army.ย
He said RSF fighters used machine guns and assault rifles to execute 10 people, most of them with disabilities, in front of a larger group. He said he persuaded them to let him contact his family to ask them to raise a ransom payment, and that he was ultimately able to buy his escape.ย
Another man, aged 31, who was injured in the shelling of an el-Fasher marketplace during the RSF siege, said he was beaten and whipped by the militia after the city fell.ย
He said they repeatedly accused him of being either a Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) or Joint Forces soldier or sympathizer because of his ethnic background, calling him a “falangay,” a derogatory term for non-Arab ethnic groups.
“They kept asking if I was SAF or a Joint Forces member, I kept saying no,” he was quoted as saying. The man was able to escape to Tawila, another nearby town not held by the RSF. There, he was reunited with his mother, but he had no information on his father’s whereabouts as of February this year.
The RSF can trace its roots back to the Janjaweed militia responsible for Darfur’s genocide of non-Arab ethnic groups in the region, like the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa peoplesย that began in 2003.
Others treated as ‘insane’ or not ‘complete,’ some allowed to buy their way out
“Others were beaten, abused or harassed because of their disability with fighters mocking them as ‘insane’ or for not being a ‘complete person,'” HRW’s Cerimovic said in the report.ย
The NGO cited an interview with a 29-year-old nurse who said she saw RSF fighters kill a man with Down syndrome, with the fighters first referring to him as insane. His sister had been carrying him on her back.ย
“After killing her brother, they tied her hands, covered her face and took her away. Human Rights Watch ongoing research has found that many women and girls were abducted to be raped or held ransom,” HRW wrote.ย
The nurse said they also killed a blind child and a woman who was unable to walk as civilians were trying to flee on October 26.ย
A 39-year-old described having to leave behind his 41-year-old brother who couldn’t walk.ย
“My brother said to us, ‘I am finished, I will die here, please just leave with your children and leave me here,'” he was quoted as saying. “We couldn’t take him. There were no cars, no camels.” The same man described seeing others with severe wounds lying on the ground and pleading for help.ย
One luckier younger man, a 22-year-old wounded in a February 2025 attack, said that the person trying to carry him from el-Fasher had gone missing.ย
“He put me down and told me he would come back. I don’t know what happened to him, whether he was killed or arrested,” he said. He said the RSF arrested him but released him in exchange for a ransom equivalent to several years’ wages in one of the world’s poorest countries.
Targeting the disabled can constitute crimes against humanity
Targeted killings of civilians and others not participating in a conflict, including those with disabilities, are war crimes, as is subjecting them to cruel or degrading treatment. If it is done as part of a widespread attack on the civilian population, such acts can constitute crimes against humanity.ย
Last week, an independent UN fact-finding mission in Sudan went a step further than this, saying that the attack on el-Fasher and particularly the actions after the city fell bore “the hallmarks of genocide.”
The UN Security Council this week sanctioned four RSF commanders over atrocities in el-Fasher.ย
The wider conflict, soon to enter its fourth year now, has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced an estimated 11 million, and triggered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.ย
Edited by: Sean Sinico