Sudan: UNSC Report - July 2025 Monthly Forecast

UN Security Council Report
July 2025 Monthly Forecast 
Dated 30 June 2025 - full copy:

Sudan

Expected Council Action

In July, the Security Council is expected to receive the semi-annual briefing on the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) activities related to the situation in Darfur. ICC Deputy Prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan is expected to brief.

Background and Key Recent Developments

More than 17 years after the Council’s ICC referral on the situation in Darfur, through resolution 1593 of 31 March 2005, the first trial opened on 5 April 2022 with the case of  Prosecutor v. Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman (“Ali Kushayb”). Abd-Al-Rahman, reportedly a former leader of the Janjaweed militia, is accused of 31 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed between August 2003 and approximately April 2004 in Darfur. The ICC concluded the trial in December 2024, and a decision is expected later this year. (For more information, see our 27 January What’s in Blue story.)

Four arrest warrants issued by the ICC remain outstanding—against former Sudanese President Omar Al Bashir; former Sudanese Minister of State for the Interior Ahmad Muhammad Harun; former Sudanese Minister of National Defence Abdel Raheem Muhammad Hussein; and former Commander-in-Chief of the Justice and Equality Movement Abdallah Banda Abakaer Nourain. Pursuant to resolution 1593 and the ICCs’ subsequent orders, Sudan remains under an obligation to surrender the four remaining suspects to the Court. According to the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP), following the outbreak of fighting in April 2023, Bashir, Hussein, and Harun—who had all been in custody in Kober prison in Khartoum—were released. Subsequently, media reports accused Harun of mobilising supporters of the former Bashir regime to fight alongside the army in Khartoum and other parts of Sudan.

According to the ICC Prosecutor’s most recent report, submitted to the Security Council on 16 January pursuant to resolution 1593, the OTP has gathered sufficient evidence to establish reasonable grounds to believe that a wide range of crimes under the Rome Statute have been—and continue to be—committed in Darfur, in the context of the ongoing conflict in Sudan that began in April 2023. These include killings, pillaging, attacks against internally displaced persons (IDP) camps, indiscriminate targeting of civilian populations, gender-based crimes, and crimes against and affecting children. (Under the Rome Statute, the ICC has jurisdiction over four crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression.) Furthermore, the OTP has continued to preserve evidence and information regarding alleged crimes committed by the Sudanese warring parties in North Darfur.

In his 27 January briefing to the Security Council, ICC Prosecutor Karim Ahmad Khan highlighted that the pattern of crimes, the perpetrators, and the targeted groups in the context of the ongoing conflict in Sudan closely resemble those from the 2003 conflict, which prompted the Council’s initial referral of the situation to the ICC. Khan emphasised the need to close the impunity gap and called for greater accountability. He expressed concern over widespread allegations regarding the targeting of women and girls, including reports of gender-based crimes. Khan confirmed that the OTP is taking steps to submit applications for arrest warrants in connection with crimes allegedly committed in West Darfur, while stressing that such applications will only be filed once the OTP is satisfied that there is a realistic prospect of conviction. He also underscored the importance of transferring Ahmad Harun to the ICC, noting its potential impact given the clear connection between Harun’s case and the recently concluded trial of Ali Kushayb.

In her remarks during the 53rd session of the Human Rights Council, Under-Secretary-General and Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide ad interim Virginia Gamba said that the Sudanese warring parties in the current conflict have committed serious human rights violations and that the risk of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in Sudan remains very high. She noted that continued and targeted attacks against certain ethnic groups, particularly in the Darfur and Kordofan regions, remain of particular concern. Gamba highlighted that the RSF and allied Arab militias continue to conduct ethnically motivated attacks against the Zaghawa, Masalit, and Fur groups.

In a 16 May statement, ICC Prosecutor Karim Ahmad Khan announced that he would temporarily step aside while the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services conducts an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct, which he has denied. In his absence, the OTP confirmed that Deputy Prosecutors Nazhat Shameem Khan and Mame Mandiaye Niang have assumed leadership responsibilities.

Human Rights-Related Developments

On 2 June, a humanitarian aid convoy comprising 15 trucks from the WFP and UNICEF came under attack in Al Koma, which is located approximately 80 kilometres from El Fasher. The attack resulted in the deaths of five personnel, injured several others, and destroyed multiple trucks and critical humanitarian supplies. A day earlier (1 June), a separate attack, reportedly attributed to the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), struck a busy market in Al Koma, killing 15 civilians and injuring dozens more. In a 4 June press release, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) called for prompt and impartial investigations into both incidents, along with meaningful steps to ensure accountability. It also urged all parties to the conflict to take concrete measures to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure, and to facilitate safe and unimpeded humanitarian access in accordance with their obligations under international humanitarian law.

In a 17 June press release, the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) for Sudan warned that the civil war is intensifying, with devastating consequences for civilians caught in the conflict. The FFM reported the increased use of heavy weaponry in populated areas, with hospitals and medical facilities coming under siege, and a sharp rise in sexual and gender-based violence. It described the situation as “a grave human rights and protection emergency.” In El Fasher, civilians have been assaulted, detained, and killed, while villages have been attacked, burned, and looted by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). 

During one RSF assault from 10 to 13 April, more than 100 civilians were reportedly killed. 

The FFM called on the international community to impose an arms embargo and to take concrete steps to ensure accountability for those responsible for serious human rights violations.

Key Issues and Options

An underlying issue for the Security Council remains how to effectively promote justice and accountability for both past atrocities committed in Darfur and the ongoing violations of international humanitarian and human rights law being perpetrated by Sudan’s warring parties across the country. 

Broadly, the continued violence, insecurity, and targeted attacks against civilians remain a major concern for Council members in the context of the current conflict. The failure to ensure accountability for crimes committed over the past two decades has contributed to the recurrence of violence and impunity in the current conflict.

A key challenge for the Council is how to strengthen cooperation between the ICC and relevant Sudanese authorities, as well as third states and international and regional organisations. This includes facilitating the execution of outstanding arrest warrants, supporting the ICC’s ongoing investigations, and enabling the safe collection and transmission of evidence. A pressing concern in this regard is the documentation, preservation, and analysis of evidence in a highly insecure and fragmented environment. 

The volatile political and security situation in Sudan and in some neighbouring countries has created numerous obstacles for the ICC, including the disruption of planned deployments, limited access to sources of information, and difficulties in maintaining contact with witnesses. Khan’s 16 January report also points to significant resource constraints faced by the OTP, which continue to adversely affect its ability to pursue investigations and carry out its mandate in relation to the situation in Darfur.

Amid growing political sensitivities and divisions among states regarding the ICC’s work, an issue for the Council is how to ensure the Court receives the necessary political backing and resources to advance its mandate, uphold accountability, and help break the cycle of impunity. In addition to the regular briefing in July, Council members supportive of the ICC’s work in Sudan could consider holding a joint press stakeout in connection with the meeting to publicly reaffirm their commitment to justice and accountability.

Council members could also consider inviting UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk to brief on the broader human rights situation in Sudan. Additionally, members may wish to invite the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Pramila Patten, who visited Sudan from 13 to 17 April, to share insights into the scale and nature of conflict-related sexual violence and the protection needs of affected populations. (For more information, see the Sudan brief in our June 2025 Monthly Forecast.)

Council Dynamics

The Council is divided on the work of the ICC. Denmark, France, Greece, Guyana, Panama, the Republic of Korea, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, and the UK are states parties to the Rome Statute of the ICC. These members have expressed strong support for the ICC’s efforts, including the conclusion of Ali Kushayb’s trial, and have commended the OTP for its continued pursuit of accountability for crimes committed in Darfur. Several have also endorsed the Prosecutor’s announcement of imminent applications for new arrest warrants linked to the current conflict in Sudan and called on the Sudanese authorities to enhance cooperation with the ICC.

On the other hand, Algeria, China, Pakistan, Russia, Somalia, and the US are not states parties to the ICC’s Rome Statute and have expressed scepticism or outright criticism of the ICC’s role. Russia has been particularly vocal, accusing the Court of selective justice and political bias. Russia’s negative view of the ICC hardened following the Court’s announcement on 17 March 2023 that it had issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova for allegedly committing the war crime of “unlawful deportation” and “unlawful transfer” of children from Ukraine to Russia.

During the Council’s 27 January briefing, Algeria, China, Pakistan, and Somalia underlined the importance of the principle of complementarity and supported Sudan’s judicial sovereignty. Algeria and Somalia also highlighted the need to revitalise Sudanese national justice institutions and to explore existing legal frameworks to administer justice, including African frameworks.

While the US has traditionally supported the ICC’s efforts concerning Sudan, it criticised the ICC for issuing arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity and war crimes linked to Israel’s military actions in Gaza since at least 8 October 2023. 

In response, on 6 February, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order imposing sanctions on the ICC and Khan. On 5 June, the US also sanctioned four individuals serving as ICC judges for their roles in authorising investigations into US personnel in Afghanistan and issuing arrest warrants for Israeli officials.

Several Council members, supportive of the ICC’s work on Darfur, have expressed concern over efforts to undermine the Court’s independence, including through the use of sanctions and political pressure. These members have condemned any attempts to intimidate the OTP, warning that such measures could hinder the Court’s ability to carry out its mandate not only in Sudan but also in other jurisdictions.

Download Complete Forecast: PDF

View original:  https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/monthly-forecast/2025-07/sudan-36.php

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Kristof is on Chad-Sudan border: Shame of hunger belongs to those who are powerful, well fed and blind

NOTE from Sudan Watch Editor: Longtime American columnist and Sudan watcher Nicholas Kristof is back in the saddle on the Chad-Sudan border. 

Kristof is a great storyteller who never lets a few facts get in his way. In his article below, he says a US partner, the UAE, supplies weapons to RSF militia in Sudan but omits to say the US is one of the leading arms traders to UAE. 

Trouble is, eye popping online news tends to spread quickly around the world and is viewed as fact before the truth has had time to get its boots on.

If Nicholas says (he doesn't) 150,000 died in Sudan and others say 15-23K, so be it. Readers of his news in New York Times assume NYT news is true.

In June, UN stated 15,500 fatalities reported in 1,400 incidents targeting civilians; 9.5M displaced – 7.3M internally, 1.9M in neighbouring countries.

This month, ACLED says "since fighting first broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on 15 April 2023, ACLED records over 7,623 events of political violence and more than 23,105 reported fatalities in Sudan. On 5 September 2024, ACLED released corrections to the Sudan data that updated events with fatalities in West Darfur state, as reported by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in its published report titled ‘The Massalit Will Not Come Home’: Ethnic Cleansing and Crimes Against Humanity in El Geneina, West Darfur, Sudan. The new information from HRW resulted in ACLED recording 2,635 additional fatalities in West Darfur during the period of April to November 2023. For more on how ACLED incorporated the information from the HRW report, see this update in the ACLED Knowledge Base".

So, Nicholas is back on the scene. Hold onto your hats Messrs Burhan and Hemeti. Longtime Sudan watchers are alive and well. Vive la révolution! 

___________________________

 

From The New York Times

OPINION editorial by By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist, reporting from the Chad/Sudan border

Dated 18 September 2024. Here is a full copy, for the record and posterity:

I Just Went to Darfur. Here Is What Shattered Me.

Credit: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

When an Arab militia rampaged through Maryam Suleiman’s village in the Darfur region of Sudan last year and lined up men and boys to massacre, the gunmen were blunt about their purpose.

“We don’t want to see any Black people,” a militia leader said, adding mockingly: “We don’t even want to see black trash bags.” To make his point, Maryam recalled, he shot a donkey because it was black.

Then the militia members executed men and boys who belonged to Black African ethnic groups, she said. 

“They shot my five brothers, one after the other,” Maryam told me, describing how her youngest brother survived the first bullet and called out to her. Then a militia member shot him in the head and sneeringly asked her what she thought of that.

The militia tried to systematically kill all the males over 10, Maryam said, and also killed some younger ones. A 1-day-old boy was thrown to the ground and killed, and one male infant was thrown into a pond to drown, she said.

The gunmen then rounded up the women and girls in a corral to rape, she added. “They raped many, many girls,” she recalled. One man tried to rape Maryam, she said, and when he failed he beat her. She was pregnant and suffered a miscarriage.

“You’re slaves,” Maryam quoted the militia members as saying. “There is no place for you Black people in Sudan.” So Maryam fled to neighboring Chad and is one of more than 10 million Sudanese who have been forcibly displaced since a civil war began last year in the country and ignited pogroms against Black African ethnic groups like hers.

Maryam Suleiman wept as she recounted how a militia in Sudan attacked her village and killed her five brothers. Photo Credit: Nicholas Kristof

The atrocities underway near here are an echo of the Darfur genocide of two decades ago, with the additional complication of famine. But there’s a crucial difference: At that time, world leaders, celebrities and university students vigorously protested the slaughter and joined forces to save hundreds of thousands of lives. Today, in contrast, the world is distracted and silent. So the impunity is allowing violence to go unchecked, which, in turn, is producing what may become the worst famine in half a century or more.

“It’s beyond anything we’ve ever seen,” Cindy McCain, the executive director of the United Nations World Food Program, told me. “It’s catastrophic.”

“Unless,” she added, “we can get our job done.”

World leaders will convene next week in New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly, but they have been mostly indifferent and are unlikely to get the job done. What’s needed is far greater pressure to end the civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the rival Arab militia, while pushing the warring parties to allow humanitarian access. All sides in the war are behaving irresponsibly, so more than half the people of Sudan — 25 million people — have become acutely malnourished already. A famine was formally declared in one area in Sudan in the summer.

WATCH VIDEO 2:18

Nicholas Kristof on the Silent Famine in Darfur

This is what I witnessed — and it shattered me.

Timmo Gaasbeek, a disaster expert who has modeled the crisis for a research institute in the Netherlands, told me that he foresees 13 million people starving to death in Sudan by October 2025, with a margin of error of two million. Such a toll would make this one of the worst famines in world history and the worst since the great Chinese famine of 65 years ago. By way of contrast, the famous Ukraine famine of the 1930s killed perhaps four million people, although estimates vary.

I can’t verify that a cataclysm of that level is approaching. Warring parties blocked me from entering Sudanese areas they controlled, so I reported along the Chad-Sudan border. Arriving refugees described starvation but not yet mass mortality from malnutrition.

All I can say is that whether or not a cataclysmic famine is probable, it is a significant risk. Those in danger are people like Thuraya Muhammad, a slight 17-year-old orphan who told me how her world unraveled when the Rapid Support Forces, the same group that killed Maryam’s five brothers, attacked her village and began burning homes and shooting men and boys.

“So many men were killed, like grains of sand,” she told me.

When Thuraya Muhammad, an orphan because of Sudan’s war, doesn’t have enough food to feed her younger sister and brother, she gives them water to fill their stomachs. Photo Credit: Nicholas Kristof

After slaughtering the men in Thuraya’s village, the militia raped many women and girls, she said. Thuraya’s cousin, a woman of 20, was among those kidnapped by the militia and hasn’t been seen since, she added.

Thuraya’s father was murdered by the militia and her mother had died earlier, so at 16 she was now the head of the household. She led her younger brother and two younger sisters to safety by walking to the Chadian border town of Adré. Gunmen tried to rob them several times, but the family had nothing left to steal.

Now in a refugee camp in Chad, Thuraya works to feed her siblings. Like other refugees, she gets a monthly food allotment from the World Food Program that helps but is insufficient. She supports her family by seeking day jobs washing clothes or cleaning houses (for about 25 cents a day). When she finds work, she and her siblings eat; if not, they may go hungry.

When I dropped by their hut, Thuraya had been unable to find work that day. A friendly neighbor had given her a cup of coffee, but she hadn’t eaten anything since the previous day — and there was no prospect of dinner, either. If there is no food, Thuraya told me, she serves water to her siblings in place of dinner.

She wept.

Thuraya wasn’t crying from her own pangs of hunger. Rather, tears tumbled silently down her cheeks out of shame at her inability to feed her brother and sisters.

“When there isn’t enough food, I give it to my sisters and brother,” she told me, and her younger sister Fatima confirmed that. “I go hungry, or else my neighbors may call me over to eat with them.”

“I’d rather my sisters and brother eat, because they cry when they go hungry,” she said. “And I can’t bear to hear them cry.”

Fatima resists the favoritism and tries to give her sister back some food. But Thuraya won’t take it and goes out, telling her brother and sisters to eat while she finds something for herself. They all know that in a refugee camp of about 200,000 hungry people, she will find nothing.

I’m hoping that Thuraya’s fortitude might inspire President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, along with world leaders gathering at the United Nations, to summon a similar resolve to tackle slaughter and starvation in Sudan. Donor nations have contributed less than half the sum needed by U.N. agencies to ease Sudan’s food crisis, and they have not insisted forcefully on either providing humanitarian access or on cutting off the flow of weapons that sustains the war.

Biden, who 20 years ago savaged President George W. Bush for not doing enough to stop the Darfur genocide, has provided aid and appointed a special envoy to push for peace talks but has said little about the current crisis. An American partner, the United Arab Emirates, supplies weapons to the militia that slaughtered and raped Thuraya’s neighbors, yet Biden has not publicly demanded that the Emirates cut off that support for killers and rapists.

The upshot of this neglect is the risk not only of a horrendous famine but also of endless war, Sudan’s fragmentation, enormous refugee flows and instability across the region.

So as world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly tuck into fine banquets next week to celebrate their humanitarianism, may they be awakened by thoughts of an orphan of Darfur who ignores her own hunger and divides scraps of bread among her brother and sisters.

Thuraya has no reason to feel ashamed that her siblings are hungry; the shame belongs to those who are powerful, well fed and blind.

What question do you have about the civil war in Sudan and the people affected by it? What more would you like to know? Submit your question or critique in the field below and Nicholas Kristof will try to respond to a selection of queries in a future installment in this series.

Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Chad and Sudan? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

View original (currently a free gift unlocked article): https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/opinion/darfur-sudan-famine.html

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