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Sudanese Paramilitary Group Committed Genocide, U.S. Says
A force fighting Sudan’s army in a brutal civil war committed massacres and rape that amount to genocide, the Secretary of State said, two decades after a finding of genocide in the same region.
Sudanese refugees from the Darfur region jostled in line to receive food during an impromptu aid distribution on the outskirts of Adré refugee camp, in Chad, in July. Credit… Ivor Prickett for The New York Times Jan. 7, 2025
The United States on Tuesday accused a Sudanese paramilitary group and its proxies of committing genocide, singling them out in a conflict of unchecked brutality and drawing fresh attention to the scale of atrocities being perpetrated in Africa’s largest war.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group fighting against Sudan’s military had committed acts of genocide, including a fearsome wave of ethnically targeted violence in the western region of Darfur.
The Treasury Department backed the determination of genocide with a raft of sanctions targeting the R.S.F.’s leader, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, as well as seven companies in the United Arab Emirates, the group’s main foreign sponsor, that have traded in weapons and gold on his behalf.
“The R.S.F. and allied militias have systematically murdered men and boys — even infants — on an ethnic basis, and deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence,” Mr. Blinken said in a statement. “Those same militias have targeted fleeing civilians, murdering innocent people escaping conflict, and prevented remaining civilians from accessing lifesaving supplies.”
The genocide determination comes two decades after the United States took a similar step in 2004, when then-Secretary of State Colin Powell determined that the Janjaweed, ruthless ethnic militias allied with Sudan’s military, had committed genocide during a vicious counterinsurgency campaign in Darfur.
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