UN human rights chief Volker Türk on Monday called on the international community to intervene immediately to stop more mass killings and other flagrant war crimes against civilians in Sudan.
Mr Türk said the call was necessary as the brutal Sudan war shows no signs of ending.
“We can only expect worse to come” unless action is taken to halt the bloodshed, Mr Türk told member states at the Human Rights Council in Geneva, as he reiterated his call for the extension of an arms embargo from Darfur to include all of Sudan.
Rival militaries from the national army and the Rapid Support Forces militia have been battling for control of the country for nearly three years.
Something must be done to address the “continuous inflow of weapons”, the high commissioner for human rights insisted, after recounting testimonies of survivors of atrocity crimes in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, by RSF, who overran the city last October.
“In one horrific example, people who fled to separate locations, thousands of kilometres apart, gave consistent accounts of the mass killing of hundreds of people sheltering at El Fasher University,” he said, describing convincing testimony that some victims were targeted based on their non-Arab ethnicity – in particular, members of the Zaghawa ethnic group.
“Survivors also spoke of seeing piles of dead bodies along roads leading away from El Fasher, in an apocalyptic scene that one person likened to the Day of Judgment,” he added.
His comments echoed the International Criminal Court’s conclusion in January that war crimes and crimes against humanity had taken place in El-Fasher, linked to the RSF’s siege.
“Our own findings are fully consistent” with that ICC assessment, Mr Türk told the Human Rights Council, at a meeting held specifically on the Sudan emergency.
Previously, the UN rights chief noted that his office had warned about previous atrocity crimes, such as the RSF offensive to capture the Zamzam camp for displaced people in April 2025.
The war in Sudan erupted in April 2023, after a power-sharing agreement broke down in the resource-rich central African nation between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF.
The resulting humanitarian emergency has affected more than 30 million people in Sudan; many have faced repeated displacement, and others have been impacted by famine and systematic sexual violence, including gang rape.
As the fighting continues away from the Darfurs in the west to the central Kordofans regions, observers fear that further grave abuses are bound to happen, including by “advanced drone weaponry systems used by both sides”, Mr Türk warned.
“In the last two weeks, the SAF and allied Joint Forces broke the sieges on Kadugli and Dilling,” he said. “But drone strikes by both sides continue, resulting in dozens of civilian deaths and injuries. Civilians are at risk of summary executions, sexual violence, arbitrary detention, and family separation.”
(NAN)