The Warrant That Wasn't: Sudan's Rapists Have Been Documented. None Have Been Charged.
UN investigators verified Sudan's mass rapes and called them crimes against humanity. Three years into the war, the ICC has not filed a single arrest warrant.
The women of El Fasher were told the world was watching. So were the women of El Obeid, whose encirclement this series traced in its fifth installment. It is worth asking, plainly, what the watching has produced.
The answer, so far, is one conviction — for crimes committed more than twenty years ago — and, for everything done in the three years since this war began, not a single arrest warrant.
The evidence is not missing. UN investigators have verified the rapes state by state, named the pattern, and called it, in the careful language their institutions permit, a weapon of war and a possible crime against humanity. What is missing is a charge, a warrant, a name on a court docket. This installment is about that gap — who is documented, who is not charged, and why the machine built to close the distance between the two has, for this war, barely moved.
The seventh installment in this series. The reporting alternates two strands — “The Ledger,” which follows the money, arms, and enablers behind the war (most recently in Part VI, “The Corridors”), and “The Weapon,” which follows its human cost. This dispatch continues “The Weapon,” begun in Part V, “The Next Crime Scene.” Either strand can be read on its own, or the whole series in order.
One conviction, twenty years late
Start with the exception, because it is the only one there is. On 6 October 2025, the International Criminal Court found Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman — the former Janjaweed commander known as “Ali Kushayb” — guilty of 27 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Darfur between August 2003 and April 2004. On 9 December 2025 the court sentenced him to 20 years’ imprisonment; the defense has appealed.
It was a genuine milestone. UN News noted it was the first ICC verdict in the Darfur situation, the first case referred by the UN Security Council under Resolution 1593 to end in conviction, and the first ever ICC conviction for gender-based persecution.
“Villages were razed, men summarily executed, and women raped in what the UN later described as one of the gravest humanitarian crises of the early 21st century. Among the evidence presented was testimony describing how Janjaweed fighters “killed the inhabitants of the town indiscriminately,” firing on people fleeing for their lives.”
Another account recalled a wounded father who urged his children to “leave him behind and save themselves” as the militia advanced. (Darfur: ICC Convicts Janjaweed Leader of War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity. Mishra Vibhu. October 6, 2025. Human Rights.)
The Deputy Prosecutor, Nazhat Shameem Khan, called it “a crucial step toward closing the impunity gap in Darfur.” Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, called it “a first measure of long-overdue redress.”
But read the dates again. Kushayb’s crimes belong to the first Darfur genocide, the one of the mid-2000s. The victims who testified from behind screens waited two decades for that verdict. And the militias Kushayb once helped lead — the Janjaweed — are the same forces that were later repackaged into the Rapid Support Forces now fighting across Sudan. The single conviction the court has produced does not touch a single crime of the current war. It is justice for the fathers and grandfathers of the women being assaulted today.
The warrants that aren’t there
For the present war, the record is starkly different. In late June 2026, Middle East Eye reported that the ICC prosecutor’s office has not applied for a single arrest warrant over crimes committed in Darfur since the war began in April 2023, despite more than three years of investigation and repeated public assurances that charges were imminent. According to that reporting, the office decided not to proceed with an arrest-warrant application against a member of the RSF that then-Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan had told judges, in January 2025, he intended to file “imminently” — an application concerning alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in West Darfur, with gender-based crimes against women and girls singled out as a priority.
What happened to it is a study in institutional drift. Karim Khan went on leave in May 2025 while facing a misconduct investigation and — separately — US sanctions, imposed after President Trump’s February 2025 executive order authorizing asset freezes and entry bans on ICC officials. Oversight of the Darfur investigation passed to his deputy, Nazhat Shameem Khan. And for more than a year, Middle East Eye reported, the prosecution offered the court’s pre-trial chamber no explanation for the missing application, until the three-judge panel criticized the office and ordered it to explain the delay and set a timeline.
Days after that story broke, the office announced good news. Visiting refugee camps in eastern Chad, Nazhat Shameem Khan told the BBC her office had achieved a “breakthrough” — “concrete evidence that links what is happening on the ground through linkage evidence to specific persons in leadership mode.” She repeated the word to the Security Council on 15 July 2026: the office had conducted crucial interviews of key witnesses “that have allowed the Office to draw a direct link between recent crimes committed in Darfur to high-level perpetrators… This is a paradigm shift. It is a breakthrough.” She was careful to add that court rules barred her from saying anything about applications for the arrest of particular individuals.
That caveat is the whole problem in miniature. A breakthrough in evidence is not a charge, and the announcement of one — arriving, as it did, days after an embarrassing leak — closed no gap on its own. Linkage evidence tying leaders to crimes is exactly what a warrant application is built from. Whether this one becomes a warrant, and when, the court will not say.
The evidence was never the problem
If the obstacle were a shortage of proof, the delay might explain itself. It is not. The documentation of sexual violence in this war is among the most extensive any modern conflict has produced.
In June 2026 the UN Human Rights Office published its fullest accounting yet, verifying — as this series reported in its fifth installment — 546 incidents of conflict-related sexual violence affecting at least 838 victims across 16 of Sudan’s 18 states, and calling even those figures “the tip of the iceberg.”
Eight hundred thirty-eight victims.
Five hundred forty-six incidents of conflict-related sexual violence.
Around 87 percent of verified incidents were attributed to the RSF, its affiliates and allied militias, with a minority attributed to the Sudanese Armed Forces and other actors.
The Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Pramila Patten, condemned the “large-scale and systematic use of sexual violence by the RSF” and urged the Security Council to consider sanctions, under its existing Sudan regime, against those who command and perpetrate it.
Amnesty International documented the same weapon in El Fasher; the UN Fact-Finding Mission concluded the city’s capture bore “the hallmarks of genocide.” The RSF denies the abuses. The evidence, in other words, has been gathered, corroborated, and published for anyone who cares to read it.
And the impunity is not the ICC’s alone. In one of the war’s bleakest details, the UN documented a case in which a woman raped by the RSF while held captive was later charged by SAF-aligned authorities with “collaboration” — and at least one woman was sentenced to death on such a charge. A survivor of one side’s weapon, condemned by the other’s court. It is a useful corrective to any impulse to see only a single villain here — and a reminder that where justice systems do move quickly in Sudan, they have sometimes moved against the wrong people.
The Impunity is Underwritten - It’s Designed That Way
Here the strand rejoins the argument this series has made from its first installment: none of this holds up on the perpetrators alone. The impunity is underwritten. It is designed that way.
The court’s own jurisdiction is part of it.
Because Sudan is not a member of the ICC, the court can act only on the Darfur situation the Security Council referred to it in 2005 — not on crimes elsewhere in the country, and, its officials stress, only against individuals, not states. Asked whether governments accused of arming the RSF, the United Arab Emirates chief among them, could be pursued, Nazhat Shameem Khan noted the court’s reach runs to individuals who contribute to crimes, not to the states behind them.
The UAE denies any link to the fighting. Rights groups have tried to widen the aperture, filing communications urging the prosecutor to investigate the role of foreign actors, including senior UAE officials, for aiding and abetting; at the 15 July Security Council session, Sudan’s representative directly blamed the “Abu Dhabi regime” and demanded the court expedite charges, warning that “any unjust delay… will send the wrong message to the perpetrators.”
The Council that could expand the court’s reach is instead split over it.
At that same session, Denmark and France called for the ICC’s mandate to be widened beyond Darfur to cover all of Sudan, and France separately urged the Council to extend the arms embargo to the entire country.
But here’s the clencher:
The United States, by contrast, told the Council the ICC “continues to pose an intolerable threat in its attempts to assert jurisdiction over the United States” — the same court whose prosecutor Washington had sanctioned months earlier.
In other words, the U.S. doesn’t like being confronted about manufacturing and selling the weapons to both sides, arming both sides of the war, and being held responsible for its involvement in the war. So the U.S. goes against Denmark’s and France’s call “for the ICC mandate to be widened beyond Darfur to cover all of Sudan…”
The Fact-Finding Mission has called for exactly the expansion the Council cannot agree on: wider ICC jurisdiction, an independent international judicial mechanism, systematic evidence preservation, and targeted sanctions. Meanwhile the three men the court has wanted for the first Darfur genocide — Omar al-Bashir, Ahmad Harun and Abdel Raheem Hussein — remain free, most of them within reach of a Sudanese government that has chosen not to hand them over.
Closing
We can get an arms embargo against drones, and a conviction of rape with the perpetrator named and found guilty. But two decades later and still this man remains free and has been involved with current militias.
Not a very encouraging record for the victims of today’s war in Sudan.
What the survivors of this war are still waiting for are names, entered into a record, that says the state considers this a crime.
The materials for it exist.
The rapes are counted.
The pattern is described.
The Deputy Prosecutor says the evidence now reaches the leadership.
Every element is present except the one that costs a perpetrator something, and it is that element — the warrant, the charge, the arrest — that has not come, held back by a court in turmoil, a Council at odds with itself, and the same web of foreign backing that keeps the war supplied.
Ali Kushayb’s victims waited twenty years to hear a court say what was done to them was a crime.
The women of El Fasher and El Obeid have been told the world is watching.
Twenty years is the measure of how long “watching” can last before it means anything.
The difference, this time, between a warrant and another two-decade wait will be decided not by whether the evidence exists — it does — but by whether anyone with the power to act on it finally does.
Investigative reporting like this is crucially important to help unravel the threads of deception behind the machinery of today’s ruthless empire. If this reporting matters to you, please help keep it going. This ongoing investigation into Sudan’s war — the weapon at the center of it, and the powers that keep the war armed and its perpetrators unindicted — is published at Manufacturing Dissent, then cross-posted to my home base at Shadows of Empire; a free or paid subscription at either or both helps keep the series going.
The full series, The Sudan War and Its Enablers, is collected on one page: The Sudan War and Its Enablers. And if you’d like to fund the sourcing behind this work directly, you can buy me a coffee, and please support my work at my home base, Shadows of Empire.
Then share it — the case for accountability is only as strong as the number of people refusing to look away.
by Dede Bell
And what about Trump?