Early on June 15, 2023, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) attacked a makeshift medical clinic in West Darfur’s capital, El Geneina, where 25 injured patients were seeking treatment. Ali, who had been shot in the leg during a previous attack, described what happened: “They started shooting at us and killed everyone except me and a woman [who was also wounded]. They shot me in the right arm. I slumped over, pretending I was dead.”

Ali and the woman stayed in the clinic, surrounded by the corpses of the patients and medical workers, for ten hours, as the RSF continued their assault on the city. At around 5 p.m., another group of seven armed men in uniform entered the clinic. “One saw that I was alive and came up to me and smashed his hand on my broken leg,” Ali recalled. “I said: ‘Please stop! Just kill me instead!’ He said: ‘We won’t kill you! We want to torture you, Nuba! We got rid of most of your family, and no one is here to care for you.’” Ali was rescued by his family hours later after the forces had left the clinic.

From late April until early November 2023, the RSF and allied militias conducted a systematic campaign to remove, including by killing, ethnic Massalit residents, such as Ali, from El Geneina, home to an ethnically mixed population of around 540,000 people. Violence began on April 24 and continued in phases over seven weeks, peaking in mid-June, with another surge in November. The massacre that Ali survived was just one in a deluge of atrocities that the RSF and allied militias, predominantly from Darfuri Arab groups, have carried out in El Geneina and West Darfur in general since the outbreak of the conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the RSF on April 15, 2023.

The events are among the worst atrocities against civilians so far in the current conflict in Sudan. The total number of dead is unknown. Sudanese Red Crescent staff said that on June 13, they counted 2,000 bodies on the streets of El Geneina and then, overwhelmed by the numbers, stopped counting. Two days later, on June 15, a large-scale massacre took place. The UN panel of experts on the Sudan estimated, citing intelligence sources, that between 10,000 and 15,000 people were killed in El Geneina in 2023.

This report provides an account of how the Rapid Support Forces and allied forces committed numerous serious violations of international humanitarian and human rights law as part of their campaign against the Massalit people of El Geneina. It is based on over 220 interviews, verification and assessment of 110 photographs and videos, and analysis of satellite imagery and documents shared by humanitarian organizations. Between April and November 2023, researchers interviewed recently displaced residents of El Geneina in person during six trips to Chad, Kenya, Uganda, and South Sudan, and also conducted supplementary telephone interviews.

Report by the Human Rights Watch