The Next Crime Scene: The Weapon Sudan's War Runs On
The fifth installment in our series on Sudan's War and Its Enablers — and the first of a strand tracing how modern wars weaponize sexual violence against civilians.
The fifth installment in our series on Sudan’s War and Its Enablers — and the first of a strand tracing how modern wars weaponize sexual violence against civilians. What UN investigators documented in El Fasher was not a byproduct of battle. It was a tactic. The same tactic is now closing around another besieged city.
As the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces tighten their grip on El Obeid, a UN investigator delivered a sentence that ought to have stopped the world cold: El Obeid, she said, must not become “the next crime scene.” The dread behind that warning is not only of shelling, drones, and the starvation a siege brings. It is of a specific crime the RSF — and, though not to the same degree, the Sudanese army — has made central to the way this war is fought, and one that, unlike rifles and drones, no arms embargo was ever written to stop.
In June 2026 the UN Human Rights Office published its most comprehensive accounting yet of what it terms conflict-related sexual violence in Sudan, and the finding was blunt: rape, gang rape and sexual slavery have been used “systematically as weapons of war,” on a scale the office called “unprecedented in terms of the scale, prevalence and brutality of its widespread use.” This installment opens a strand of reporting on that weapon — how it is deployed, who wields it, and who keeps the wielders armed. It begins where the evidence is heaviest: in Darfur, in a city that fell a year ago, and in the city the same forces are encircling now.
This article is contributed by Dede Bell.
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A weapon, not a byproduct
The scale is documented, and it is deliberate. The UN Human Rights Office verified 546 incidents of conflict-related sexual violence affecting at least 838 victims — 539 women, 284 girls, eight men and seven boys — across 16 of Sudan’s 18 states between April 2023 and April 2026, and called those verified figures only “the tip of the iceberg,” obscured by stigma, insecurity, and collapsed health services. Around 87 percent of verified incidents were attributed to men in RSF uniforms, its affiliates and allied Arab militias; incidents were also attributed to the Sudanese Armed Forces and other armed actors.
The impunity runs in more than one direction. In a detail that should trouble anyone inclined to see only one villain here, the UN documented a case in which a woman subjected to sexual violence under RSF coercion was later charged by SAF-aligned security forces with “collaboration” — and at least one woman was sentenced to death on such a charge. The RSF, for its part, denies the abuses, calling the accounts fabrications by its enemies.
El Fasher: the template
To understand what the warnings about El Obeid mean, look at what happened when the last siege ended. The RSF seized El Fasher, capital of North Darfur, in late October 2025 after an 18-month blockade. The UN Human Rights Office documented more than 6,000 killings in the first three days. And in a February 2026 report reaffirmed and expanded in July, the UN Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan concluded that the assault bore “the hallmarks of genocide” against the Zaghawa and Fur communities — a determination echoing the U.S. government’s own January 2025 genocide finding against the RSF, covered in this series’ first installment.
Sexual violence was not incidental to that campaign; it was woven through it. UN experts described widespread and “sadistic” sexual violence “as a deliberate strategy of domination and humiliation aimed at destroying communities,” with women raped in front of relatives and detained for days in conditions amounting to torture. Crucially, the mission found the violence was ethnically selective: women and girls from the Zaghawa and other non-Arab communities were targeted, while women perceived as Arab were often spared. Amnesty International, which titled its own report City Under Siege, Children Under Fire, documented rape, sexual slavery and the deliberate targeting of children; among its survivor testimonies was Tasneem, a 13-year-old Zaghawa girl abducted after RSF fighters killed her father, then held and raped.
That selectivity is why investigators now treat the rapes not merely as war crimes but as evidence of intent. The Fact-Finding Mission has said it is examining whether the pattern of mass rape, forced pregnancy and denial of reproductive healthcare could constitute a fourth genocidal act — “measures intended to prevent births within the group” under the Genocide Convention. In that framing, the weapon is not aimed only at the woman in the room. It is aimed at whether her people continue to exist.
The playbook moves east
The reason the El Fasher record reads as prophecy rather than history is that its authors say the same script is now being run 500 kilometres away. The Fact-Finding Mission warned in July that the RSF is “currently deploying tactics used in El Fasher” around El Obeid — encircling the city, striking its infrastructure, and choking off essential services; the Human Rights Council has tasked the mission with investigating the city. Türk was blunter still: “We have seen this playbook before. We know where it led then, and cannot allow a repeat of the preventable atrocities we documented in El Fasher and Zamzam.”
El Obeid, capital of North Kordofan, holds about half a million people, including more than 100,000 already displaced from elsewhere — among them survivors of El Fasher, trapped once more before a force that has already tried to destroy them. Its demographics are not El Fasher’s, and analysts caution the ethnic dimension may be less pronounced; but they warn civilians could still face “looting, sexual violence and attacks on those accused of supporting the army.” The alarms are no longer only from rights groups: the UN Security Council warned in June of an “imminent risk of mass atrocities” and demanded the RSF halt its assault, and Al Jazeera reported that OHCHR had already documented, in the surrounding region, “widespread credible reports of ethnically targeted violence, including sexual and gender-based violence.”
The weapon with no embargo
Here this piece rejoins the argument that this series has made from its first installment: none of this runs on the RSF alone. Human Rights Watch states plainly that throughout the conflict, the RSF “has received military support from the UAE,” which has directly backed the group and facilitated the recruitment of hundreds of private military contractors on its behalf — support Abu Dhabi denies. Amnesty International, launching its El Fasher report, was broader: “Europe, the US, China and others sold the weapons that’s fueling the conflict.” The Fact-Finding Mission has gone so far as to set out the potential complicity of states that continued to arm or otherwise support the RSF.
The Paradox
The world knows how to write an arms embargo: one has existed over Darfur for years, and the G7 and EU have urged extending it to all of Sudan. In July the European Parliament voted to designate the RSF a terrorist organization and to sanction those responsible for attacks on civilians, including a UAE-based company, condemning “any foreign interference fueling the war.” Embargoes can name the drone and the rifle. But there is no embargo on the weapon that defined El Fasher and now shadows El Obeid — because that weapon runs not on shipments but on impunity, and the impunity holds precisely because the shipments, and the diplomatic cover behind them, keep coming.
Closing
Sexual violence in Sudan is a weapon.
A UN fact-finding mission, the UN Human Rights Office, Amnesty International, and the survivors themselves have said, in the plainest language their institutions permit, that sexual violence in Sudan is a weapon — coordinated, ethnically aimed, and, in El Fasher, part of what investigators call genocide. The Fact-Finding Mission still calls this a matter of a closing window, insisting there is time to prevent El Obeid from becoming “the next crime scene” if the Security Council acts and the arming states relent.
This strand of our reporting will follow that weapon — in Sudan first, and wherever else it is wielded — because it is among the oldest instruments of war and the least often punished.
The women of El Fasher were told the world was watching. The women of El Obeid are being told the same thing now. The difference between a warning and an epitaph will be decided, once again, by whether the governments that supply this war decide to stop.
This ongoing investigation into Sudan’s war and the powers sustaining it — and this new strand on how that war is waged against (mostly) women’s and girls’ bodies — runs at Manufacturing Dissent, cross-posted from my home base at Shadows of Empire; a free or paid subscription at either helps keep the series operating. The full series, The Sudan War and Its Enablers, is now collected on one page for easy reading: The Sudan War and Its Enablers. If you’d like to fund the sourcing behind work like this directly, you can buy me a coffee. And share it — the people of El Obeid were promised the world was watching.
by Dede Bell
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Notes
¹ A note on sourcing and care. The accounts here are drawn from the published findings of the UN Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan, the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR), and Amnesty International, and from survivor testimony those bodies documented; “Tasneem” is a pseudonym used by Amnesty. Verified incident and victim figures are minimums — the UN describes them as “the tip of the iceberg.” The RSF denies committing these abuses. Sexual violence in the war has been attributed overwhelmingly to the RSF and allied militias but also, in a minority of verified incidents, to the Sudanese Armed Forces and other actors; this piece reflects that. “Genocide” is used here as the finding of the UN Fact-Finding Mission (and, as to the RSF, the U.S. government’s January 2025 determination), not as a settled judicial verdict; the ICJ dismissed Sudan’s separate genocide-complicity case against the UAE on jurisdictional grounds, as covered in this series’ first installment. The UAE denies arming the RSF.
Works Cited
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