Sudan Genocide Emergency: September 2025
- Genocide Watch
- 4 minutes ago
- 3 min read
By Omar Kausar and Grace Harris
Since April 2023, the Republic of Sudan (Sudan) has been engulfed in one of the deadliest civil wars of the 21st century. The civil war is between two opposing factions of the Sudanese Military: the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the legitimized paramilitary group composed of the former Janjaweed militia responsible for the 2003 genocide. During the war, the SAF and RSF have attacked civilians with airstrikes and heavy artillery in densely populated areas. According to the OHCHR, the damage to civilian objects and civilian lives continues. Both parties have committed large-scale human rights abuses and violated International Humanitarian Law (IHL), which may constitute War Crimes and/or Crimes against Humanity.
Additionally, the SAF and RSF have perpetrated numerous international crimes including sexual and gender-based violence, rape, sexual slavery, abduction, arbitrary arrest and detention, torture and ill-treatment, looting, pillaging, ethnically and gender-motivated attacks on civilians, and conscripting children into hostilities. Sexual and gender-based violence is among the most significant crimes. According to the United Nations (UN) Fact-Finding Mission in Sudan, it has long been used as a weapon of war, particularly in Sudan. The crisis has continued to escalate in 2025 with a significant rise in civilian killings, executions, ethnic violence, and a worsening humanitarian situation. An estimated 3,384 civilians have been killed in the first half of 2025 alone, while estimates of the total death toll from all conflict-related causes range from 20,000 to 150,000. However, the actual figure is unknown.
Moreover, civilians continue to bear the brunt of this devastation. It has killed tens of thousands of people, forced 12 million from their homes, and created the world’s largest hunger and displacement crisis. Last August, the Famine Review Committee declared that famine is occurring in Sudan, particularly in the North Darfur region. Conditions have only worsened since then, with famine confirmed in 5 areas, 24.6 million or half the nation’s population experiencing acute food insecurity, 8.6 million internally displaced, and 4 million forced to flee as refugees. Furthermore, the RSF has directly targeted Darfur’s ethnically non-Arab populations, the Masalit, Fur, and Zaghawa. This is a resurgence of the same genocidal intent of the 2003 Darfur Genocide.
In recent news, while the state of Sudan filed a case at the International Court of Justice against the UAE for alleged violations of the Genocide Convention, this was dismissed in May. In June, the RSF set fire to several villages and brutally massacred 300 people, including pregnant women and children, in the North Kordofan region. More recently, 84 people were killed at prayer in an RSF missile strike on a mosque, becoming the bloodiest day the city of el-Fasher has seen since the onset of conflict. Well into the third year of outright war, the SAF controls much of western Sudan, while the RSF controls the eastern regions, including Darfur.
Because of the targeted nature of violence and the lingering tensions from the 2003 genocide, Genocide Watch deems the war in Sudan has escalated to stage nine of the Ten Stages of Genocide: Extermination.
Genocide Watch Recommends the Following
An immediate and long-lasting ceasefire in Sudan.
The UN Security Council to re-create the Sudan Commission of Inquiry to report on crimes being committed in Sudan.
The UN Security Council to implement an arms embargo on Sudan and to sanction those countries that violate the embargo.
The UN Security Council to compel Sudan to comply with the existing ICC Arrest Warrants for Sudan.
