Over 1,000 Were Killed in Attack on Camp in Darfur, Sudan, U.N. Says

A paramilitary attack in April was one of the most brutal of Sudan’s civil war. Now, hunger is spreading as Western aid cuts have reduced U.N. rations.

Paramilitaries in Sudan killed over 1,000 people, one-third of them in summary executions, in an attack in April against a famine-stricken camp for displaced people, the United Nations human rights body said on Thursday.

The revised toll was over three times as great as earlier estimates from one of the most notorious episodes of Sudan’s atrocity-filled civil war.

The killings by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F., which has been fighting Sudan’s military for nearly three years, “may constitute the war crime of murder,” Volker Türk, the head of the U.N. body, said in a statement.

The slaughter occurred over three days in April in the western region of Darfur as R.S.F. fighters seized control of the sprawling Zamzam camp, the largest in Sudan. At the time, about 500,000 people were estimated to live in the camp.

Most residents fled. In the report published on Thursday, the United Nations said its investigators had since documented the killing of 1,013 people, 319 of whom were summarily executed. In one incident, fighters killed the entire staff of the largest medical clinic in the camp. They also set homes on fire and carried out widespread sexual violence.

The United Nations said in its report that it had documented 104 cases of sexual assault — against 75 women, 26 girls and three boys, mostly from the Zaghawa ethnic group.

The R.S.F. was accused of even greater atrocities in October when it seized El Fasher, a city about six miles north of Zamzam, after a brutal 18-month siege.

Only a handful of aid workers have since managed to reach El Fasher, where famine has taken hold. But there is mounting evidence of widespread killings and of a concerted effort to hide them.

Using satellite imagery, the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale has identified 150 “clusters of objects” that are consistent with human remains at various locations in El Fasher, it says.

The R.S.F. has “destroyed and concealed evidence of its widespread mass killings through burial, burning, and removal of human remains on a mass scale,” the research lab said this week.

The atrocities in Sudan have sharpened scrutiny of the role of the United Arab Emirates, the R.S.F.’s main foreign sponsor. United Nations investigators, American officials and lawmakers have accused the Emirates of providing the R.S.F. with weapons, drones and mercenaries since the civil war started in April 2023. The United States Treasury last week imposed sanctions on a network of Colombian mercenaries fighting alongside the R.S.F., although it stopped short of measures against the Emirati companies that reportedly employed them.

The United Arab Emirates has ramped up its support for the R.S.F. even as it has repeatedly denied providing any assistance to the group, according to Western officials and analysts who follow the crisis. At the same time, Emirati officials are stepping up efforts to present themselves as peace brokers in Sudan, meeting and posing for photos with the same American, European and United Nations officials who have decried R.S.F. atrocities.

The military and diplomatic maneuvering come against the backdrop of a rapidly worsening humanitarian catastrophe in Sudan as Western aid cuts hurt efforts to contain spreading hunger.

Famine was declared in Zamzam last year and has spread to other parts of the country. Last month, the latest report from the global authority on hunger, known as the I.P.C., found evidence of continuing famine in El Fasher and in Kadugli, a city in the Kordofan region.

The body warned of an imminent risk of famine in 20 other places in Sudan and said that an estimated 21.2 million people, or 45 percent of the population, faced acute hunger in September across the country.

But severe aid cuts by the United States and other countries are hampering the international response to the crisis. The World Food Program said last week that, starting in January, it would have to cut rations in famine-stricken areas to 70 percent of current levels.

“Even with these measures, W.F.P. only has resources to sustain current support for four months,” Ross Smith, the organization’s director of emergency preparedness, told reporters at a briefing last week, appealing for $695 million in emergency funding.

Since the fall of El Fasher, the R.S.F. has shifted its focus to the Kordofan region in recent months, notching up battlefield victories including the capture of Sudan’s largest oil facility, Heglig.

Advanced Chinese-made drones, most likely supplied by the Emirates, are playing a significant role in those gains, Western officials and military analysts say.

On Thursday, Sudanese news outlets reported a new wave of R.S.F. drone strikes against military and infrastructure targets in the cities of Atbara and El Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan state. A major power station was hit, killing two workers and causing outages in several states, the national power company said.

Six Bangladeshi peacekeepers were killed last week when a drone fired missiles into a U.N. base in Kordofan. Sudan’s military blamed the attack on the R.S.F., which refuted the charges as “false accusations.”

Abdalrahman Altayeb contributed reporting from El Obeid, Sudan.

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