The war is not contracting. It is metastasizing.
Three years into a war that has no end in sight, two of the world's most authoritative human rights bodies are now saying out loud what many observers have feared: what is happening in Sudan bears the hallmarks of genocide.
The joint warning came on April 13, 2026, as the conflict marked its third anniversary — and entered its fourth year. The UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan and the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, operating under an African Union mandate, released a combined assessment of conditions on the ground. Their conclusion was unsparing: both the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces have committed war crimes. The RSF has gone further still.
Since fighting broke out on April 15, 2023, tens of thousands of civilians and combatants have been killed. The RSF and SAF have both carried out killings, arbitrary detention, torture, and indiscriminate attacks — airstrikes, artillery, and drone strikes — against populated areas. Medical facilities and food markets, the kinds of places that keep people alive, have been deliberately targeted. Humanitarian convoys have been attacked. Aid workers, doctors, and human rights monitors have been killed, wounded, detained, or simply disappeared.
But the investigators drew a sharper line around the RSF's conduct. Its violations, they found, were not incidental or chaotic — they followed an organized, recurring pattern. Looting. Sexual violence. Ethnic targeting. And in El Fasher, the last major city in Darfur not yet fully under RSF control, something worse. When RSF forces took over El Fasher in October 2025, investigators documented what they described as an egregious pattern of identity-based targeting directed at members of the Zaghawa and Fur communities. That pattern, the UN mission concluded, bears the hallmarks of genocide.
The geographic reach of the violence has widened steadily. Grave violations have been documented in Khartoum, across Darfur, in Gezira and Kordofan — and are now spreading into the Blue Nile, White Nile, and Nuba regions. The war is not contracting. It is metastasizing.
Behind the military front lines, a humanitarian catastrophe of historic scale is unfolding. As of early March 2026, more than 8.6 million people had been internally displaced within Sudan. Another four million had crossed international borders as refugees. Together, that is more than 12.6 million people uprooted — one of the largest displacement crises anywhere on earth. Women, children, the elderly, and other vulnerable groups are absorbing the worst of it.
The ACHPR mission catalogued the rights being violated in terms that read like a systematic dismantling of human life: the right to life, to dignity, to liberty, to movement, to food and medicine, to security. Children's rights. Collective rights. The rights of peoples to simply exist in peace.
Both missions are now calling on all parties — the RSF, the SAF, African Union member states, UN member states, and regional bodies — to act. Their demands include a comprehensive ceasefire, guaranteed humanitarian access, enforcement of the Darfur arms embargo established under UN Security Council Resolution 1556 in 2004, and full cooperation with the International Criminal Court. They are also calling for the creation of a new, independent judicial mechanism specifically designed to prosecute international crimes committed in Sudan — a recognition that existing institutions alone may not be enough to break what the missions describe as a central driver of the conflict: impunity.
The investigators have not been given access to Sudan to conduct their work directly. They are asking for it. That request, like the ceasefire calls and the accountability demands, remains unanswered. What comes next depends almost entirely on whether the international community treats this anniversary as a turning point or simply another date on a calendar that keeps moving forward while Sudan burns.
Notable Quotes
Impunity is a central driver of this conflict and will continue to undermine prospects for durable peace in Sudan and the wider region.— Joint statement, UN and ACHPR-AU Fact-Finding Missions
The RSF's violations reflect an organized and recurrent pattern — looting, sexual violence, and ethnic targeting — devastating lives and shattering communities.— UN and ACHPR-AU Fact-Finding Missions, joint assessment
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
When they say genocide hallmarks, what exactly does that mean in legal terms?
It means the investigators found a pattern of targeting people specifically because of who they are — their ethnicity, their community — not just because they were in the way of a military objective. In El Fasher, that meant the Zaghawa and Fur peoples being singled out. The word genocide carries a precise legal threshold, and the mission stopped short of a formal declaration, but hallmarks is not a casual word.
Why El Fasher specifically?
It was the last major city in Darfur that hadn't fallen under RSF control. When it did, in October 2025, investigators say what followed wasn't the chaos of battle — it was organized, identity-based targeting. That distinction matters enormously under international law.
Both sides are accused of war crimes. Does that mean they're equally culpable?
Not in the investigators' telling. The SAF and RSF are both found responsible for killings, torture, arbitrary detention, indiscriminate attacks. But the RSF findings go further — crimes against humanity, starvation as a weapon, widespread rape, and now the genocide hallmarks finding. The scale and systematization are different.
Twelve and a half million people displaced. How do you even hold that number in your head?
You probably can't, not really. What you can hold is that Sudan's total population is around 48 million. So roughly one in four people has been forced from their home. That's the proportion. One in four.
The missions are calling for an arms embargo to be enforced. Hasn't that embargo existed since 2004?
It has. Resolution 1556 was passed over twenty years ago, specifically targeting Darfur. The fact that they're still calling for its enforcement tells you something about how consistently it's been ignored.
What's the significance of calling for a new judicial mechanism alongside the ICC?
The ICC moves slowly and has jurisdictional constraints. A complementary mechanism could be faster, broader, and more specifically tailored to Sudan's situation. It's an acknowledgment that the scale of what's happened may exceed what any single institution can handle.
The missions don't have access to Sudan. How are they gathering evidence?
Remotely — survivor testimony, satellite imagery, documentation from people who've fled, open-source verification. It's painstaking and incomplete by definition. Their request for physical access has gone unanswered, which itself tells you something about what the parties to this conflict want the world to see.