UN Human Rights Council warns El Obeid may face similar fate to El Fasher

United Nations, New York City

Sphinx News: Ahmed Ali

As the Sudanese civil war spills into its third year of tragedy, host to the brutality of both the Rapid Support Force and the Sudanese Armed Foces warring parties, UN human rights experts warn that the atrocities of El Fasher may be replicated in El Obeid.

Since 2023, after the complete collapse of a civilian-led governing body under the auspices of both the RSF and SAF, Sudan has been host to a calamitous civil war, one which has seen, according to the United Nations, the forced displacement of over 11 million, coupled with the death of over 150,000 people.

As the war has pervaded throughout the country, the primary aggressors have practically partitioned the state, divided between an eastern stronghold host to the Sudanese Armed Forces and a western stronghold host to the outposts of a former mercenary group, sanctioned by the previous Sudanese ruler Omar al-Bashir, the Rapid Support Force.

With countless war crimes perpetrated by both Sudanese factions, conveniently sponsored by influential outside state actors, the conflict has transcended in its geopolitical dimensions, particularly accentuated with the RSF’s recent capture of El Fasher, the Sudanese Armed Forces’ last military stronghold in Sudan’s western Darfur state.

Culminating in October 2025, the RSF paramilitary group has been credibly accused of committing inconceivable acts of injustice within El Fasher, reprehensible war crimes that amount to the death of tens of thousands of civilians across the city’s various locales.

While the capture of El Fasher garnered widespread media attention, driving state actors and multilateral international organizations like the United Nations to condemn such staunch acts of brazen inhumanity, a recent report published by the United Nations Human Rights Council has found reputable evidence to label the attacks as a “genocide.”

Officially published on July 8, the independent international Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan, authorized by the United Nations Human Rights Council of Geneva, Switzerland, found conclusive evidence, hallmarking the El Fasher incident as “mass killings,” indicators of a “genocidal path.”

The new report is predicated on the initial findings of the international Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan in a report titled Hallmarks of Genocide in El Fasher. Despite its insistent title, the report, published on February 26, 2026, found “evidence of atrocities, including detention, torture, ransom-taking and the enforced disappearance of civilians,” not immediately outlining any unequivocal evidentiary basis that a clear, purposeful, mass series of murders had been committed.

The new report, however, sustains that the attacks by RSF forces in El Fasher undoubtedly constitute, recognizing the standard of proof of “reasonable grounds to believe” bound to all UN fact-finding and judicial bodies, a genocide, one which serves as an alarming precedent for the current state of affairs in El Obeid.

“The evidence thus far collected by the mission on the situation regarding El-Fasher includes interviews with 333 survivors,” along with “online consultation with survivors who had fled from El Fasher” into both South Sudan and Chad.

The report’s findings are sensitive yet vivid, recalling an incident that purposefully restricted the movement of civilian casualties, creating “famine conditions in the city.”

Additionally, the report noted the siege’s disparaging conditions on women and girls, stating, “Movement restrictions exacerbated the already weakened healthcare system, particularly affecting women in need of urgent maternal and reproductive care. In several cases, women who became pregnant as a result of rape resorted to unsafe abortion practices due to the lack of timely medical care, leading to severe complications, including hemorrhage and death.”

The Fact-Finding Commission also found, in its conversations with survivors, “widespread killings, including indiscriminate shootings and point-blank executions of civilians in homes, in trenches and in public buildings where they were hiding, in market areas, near the airport fence, in open areas or while attempting to flee the city.”

Mohamed Chande Othman, Chair of the Fact-Finding Mission, said, “The patterns we documented in El Fasher—including encirclement, attacks on civilian infrastructure, restrictions on humanitarian access, and widespread abuses against civilians—serve as a stark warning. The international community must heed these lessons and act to prevent further catastrophe.”

The catastrophe in the report provides immediate precedent for the current situation in El Obeid. The capital of North Kordofan state, El Obeid, is currently under SAF control, but the city has faced “siege-like conditions” for 18 months, said UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk on July 3, 2026.

The comments were made during the Human Rights Council’s urgent debate on El Obeid on July 3, where the Fact-Finding Mission “warned that patterns previously observed in El Fasher appear to be emerging in El Obeid, including the city’s encirclement, attacks on infrastructure.”

“The lessons of El Fasher must not be ignored,” said Mona Rishmawi, an expert member of the Fact-Finding Mission. “Our new paper demonstrates not only the devastating human cost of the atrocities committed in and around El Fasher, but also the warning signs that preceded them. We have seen this pattern before: the encirclement of cities, attacks on civilian infrastructure, restrictions on humanitarian access, and escalating violence against civilians. These are not isolated incidents—they are warning signs of further atrocity crimes.”

In a resolution adopted by the UN Human Rights Council on July 6, 2026, the Council requested the Fact-Finding Mission to conduct, similar to what it did for El-Fasher, an urgent investigation into “any violations and abuses of international human rights law, violations of international humanitarian law, and related international crimes allegedly committed in El Obeid.”

Echoing the report’s urgency, Stéphane Dujarric, Spokesman for the Secretary-General, expressed deep concern about Sudan’s prolonged collapse and the report’s disturbing findings, telling reporters that the Secretary-General remains solicitous of the plight of all Sudanese people affected by the perpetual conflict.

“What he wants to see,” says Dujarric, “is a redoubling of unified action to put a stop to the conflict in Sudan, and of course, we’re all, in a sense, rightly focused on the fears of what may happen in El Obeid.”