The world’s worst humanitarian crisis is unfolding in Sudan - we must not look away (UK FM Cooper)

"Today we are announcing that the UK will jointly convene with Germany a major international conference on Sudan in Berlin in April, as we mark the third anniversary of this devastating conflict. And the UK will use its voice and Presidency of the United Nations Security Council next month, to prevent Sudan again slipping down the international agenda." - Yvette Cooper, UK Foreign Secretary. Read more.

From The Independent.co.uk

Editorial by Yvette Cooper, UK Foreign Secretary

Published Friday 09 January 2026 10:00 GMT - full copy:

The world’s worst humanitarian crisis is unfolding in Sudan - we must not look away

As the conflict in Sudan passes the grim milestone of 1,000 days, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper writes that the same diplomatic energy that helped end the war in Gaza is needed to end the crisis

South Sudan's worsening water crisis [VIDEO]

The world is catastrophically failing the people of Sudan. Today marks a grim milestone – 1,000 days of devastating violent conflict involving unimaginable atrocities, millions pushed into famine, and the most barbaric abuse of Sudan’s women.

The scale of the humanitarian crisis happening now is greater than any in the 21st century and the security consequences are likely to be felt far beyond Sudan for many years to come.

The world must not look away from the conflict between the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Armed Forces that is terrorising Sudan. I am determined we shine a searing spotlight on the unfolding atrocities and make 2026 the year the world comes together to drive urgent new momentum towards peace.

Last month, I listened as Sudanese civilians and community workers from their Emergency Response Rooms recounted the horrific human cost of the RSF’s October capture of the town of El Fasher after a grinding 18-month siege – including ethnically motivated mass killings and use of rape and starvation as weapons of war.

These stories on the ground corroborated the satellite images from space – images of blood-soaked earth and mass graves that all too briefly jolted the world’s attention.

Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper (Reuters)

Aid workers in Tawila gave me a virtual tour of the makeshift camps where hundreds of distressed children arrived having made a 46-mile journey from El Fasher on foot. Traumatised women and children are scraping an existence with scant rations under thornbush shelters.

International Rescue Committee (IRC) staff recounted their struggle to support unprecedented numbers of victims of sexual violence in what they described as a war on women’s bodies. As shocking as what I saw was what I did not see – boys or men. Fathers, husbands and brothers missing, likely killed, following forced separation from their families.

Over 30 million people still need lifesaving aid. Famine is spreading. Infrastructure has collapsed. Preventable diseases are rampant. The conflict is escalating and spreading in the Kordofan region. 

The RSF have been accused of war crimes (File picture). 

Rapid Support Forces

For the leaders of Sudan’s warring parties to refuse to halt the war or to prevent massacres and atrocities on this scale is horrendous. For so many soldiers to be systematically raping Sudanese women is barbaric.

The case for action is deeply moral. But it is also about our wider security. Wars that rage unresolved radiate instability. They undermine the security of neighbouring states, they become easy targets for extremist groups to exploit. And they lead migrants to embark on dangerous international journeys.

Sudan’s war goes far beyond Sudan. It is regionalised and globalised. It poses a global test of our ability to mobilise the agile alliances, partnerships and multilateral weight to get a breakthrough.

Words of international concern or outrage are not enough. We need a concerted diplomatic drive to arrest the spiralling violence and suffering.

Sudanese residents gather to receive free meals in Al Fasher 

(AFP via Getty Images)

The US have been working to get a truce and wider plan in place – drawing together the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt (the ‘Quad’). That is why last month in Washington I held talks with Secretary Rubio and the President’s senior advisor on Africa and I have repeatedly engaged Quad members on ways forward.

But we need the same international focus and energy now from right across the world that we had around securing the Gaza ceasefire.

Today we are announcing that the UK will jointly convene with Germany a major international conference on Sudan in Berlin in April, as we mark the third anniversary of this devastating conflict. And the UK will use its voice and Presidency of the United Nations Security Council next month, to prevent Sudan again slipping down the international agenda.

At the heart of international efforts must be pursuing the humanitarian truce and a push for a permanent end to hostilities. This can only come through greater pressure on the warring parties – crucially from their regional backers.

Second, we have to prevent further atrocities by either side. This means working to raise the cost of committing or backing further massacres. On 12 December, the UK sanctioned senior RSF commanders, including the so-called “Butcher of El Fasher” who has openly boasted on social media of murdering Sudanese civilians.

Sudanese who fled el-Fasher city crowd to receive food at their camp in Tawila (AP)

And we are working to combat impunity and hold perpetrators to account. In November, UK leadership at the UN Human Rights Council secured international agreement to an urgent UN inquiry into crimes in El Fasher. We are supporting vital investigations by the International Criminal Court.

Third, unimpeded aid needs to reach populations in need. The UK has provided an additional £21 million for food, shelter, health services and protection of women and children in hardest to reach areas. This brings our total support to £146 million this financial year.

But for aid to save more lives, the belligerents must lift their deliberate and systematic barriers to humanitarian access.

Ultimately, no amount of aid can resolve a crisis of this magnitude until the guns fall silent. It must be the Sudanese people, not any warring group, that determine Sudan’s future.

The world must now come together around this cause – to stem the bloodshed and help set Sudan on a path to peace.

View original: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/sudan-war-humanitarian-crisis-yvette-cooper-b2897125.html

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Sudan siege ends in bloodbath despite pleas for mercy. Evidence emerges of atrocities committed by paramilitary RSF after it seized control of El Fasher

Report from The Financial Times
By William Wallis in Cairo 
Published Wednesday 29 October 2025 - full copy:

Sudan siege ends in bloodbath despite pleas for mercy 

Evidence emerges of atrocities committed by the paramilitary RSF after it seized control of El Fasher 

A camp for displaced families who fled from El Fasher to Tawila in North Darfur © Mohammed Jamal/Reuters 

The fall of the besieged Sudanese city of El Fasher has turned into a bloodbath that rights activists and experts have foretold for months, according to local and international organisations monitoring the war. 

Since Sunday — when militia fighters of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) over-ran the military garrison in the city, the last stronghold of the Sudan Armed Forces in the west of the country — evidence has emerged of many atrocities against civilians trapped or trying to flee. 

The UN Human Rights Office said it was receiving multiple, alarming reports, including of summary executions committed by the RSF, since the group seized most of El Fasher in the western region of Darfur. The RSF, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, is vying for control of all of Sudan. 

“Multiple distressing videos received by UN Human Rights show dozens of unarmed men being shot or lying dead, surrounded by RSF fighters,” the UN said. 

Jim Risch, Republican chair of the US Senate foreign relations committee, said on X that the RSF should be designated a foreign terrorist organisation. 

“The horrors in Darfur’s El Fasher were no accident — they were the RSF’s plan all along,” he said. “The RSF has waged terror and committed unspeakable atrocities, genocide among them, against the Sudanese people . . . America is not safer, secure or more prosperous with the RSF slaughtering thousands.” 

The RSF’s capture of El Fasher has potentially far-reaching consequences for Sudan and its two-year civil war. 

The conflict has displaced more than 14mn people, according to the UN, provoked famine and claimed more than 150,000 lives. 

Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, is head of the RSF

 © Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah/Reuters

El Fasher is the largest city in western Sudan and sits at a crossroads of trade routes, giving the RSF greater control of the flow of weapons and supplies into the region through Libya and Chad. 

The end of the siege, and the flight of the SAF and allied former rebels on Sunday, potentially frees up RSF militants to take the fight back to areas of the east and centre of Sudan from which they were driven earlier this year. 

General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Sudan’s military leader and Hemedti’s rival, on Monday said the army had withdrawn as a result of the “systematic destruction they endured” in the city. 

The killings that have ensued, despite repeated warnings based on previous massacres committed by the RSF, marks a new low for decades-long international efforts to protect civilians from war crimes. 

In videos posted online in the past two days, fighters from the RSF, which grew out of the Janjaweed militia that wreaked havoc on Darfur’s Black tribes in the early part of the century, shout racial slurs and revel in pursuing rake-thin men, women and children fleeing across the scrub outside the city. 

Satellite image shows objects on the ground near what are likely to be RSF vehicles in El Fasher on Monday © AP 

Dozens of captured men, bound and lying in rows along the ground, are denigrated and then executed in footage allegedly posted from RSF accounts. 

Among those captured was Muammar Ibrahim, a freelance journalist who has chronicled the fate of civilians trapped in the city during a nearly 19-month siege. Inhabitants depended on dwindling supplies of animal feed and were under constant drone and artillery bombardment. 

Many advocacy groups have been demanding the release of the Al Jazeera contributor. 

Among those killed on Sunday, according to Sudanese activists in touch with the city and surrounding camps for the displaced, was Siham Hassan, a prominent campaigner for social justice. She was once Sudan’s youngest MP and was running a community kitchen. 

Nathaniel Redmond, director of the Yale school of public health, said on Tuesday that the “horror, scale and velocity of killing” in El Fasher had left pools of blood visible from satellites. 

Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab — which has been tracking the siege using satellite imagery, open-source online information and testimony from eyewitnesses — said it had found “multiple credible reports of mass killings across social media and open sources” in recent days. 

Satellite imagery showing bodies on the ground and “vehicles in tactical formations consistent with house-to-house clearance operations” in a neighbourhood with thousands of civilians also supported allegations that the RSF had carried out mass killings, Yale’s HRL said. 

“The world must act immediately to put the maximum amount of pressure on the RSF and its backers, specifically the [United Arab Emirates], to end the killing now,” it said, adding that the RSF’s actions “may be consistent with war crimes and crimes against humanity and may rise to the level of genocide”. 

Sudanese refugees from Zamzam camp outside El Fasher receive food at an emergency kitchen while being relocated to a transit camp near the Chad border in Tine, eastern Chad, in May © Getty Images 

“The nations of the world might be able to say that they could not have stopped it, but they cannot reasonably say that they did not know,” Yale’s HRL said. 

The RSF said it was committed to “protecting civilians in El Fasher”, and had deployed specialised teams to clear landmines and “secure the streets and public spaces”. 

It described the “liberation” of El Fasher as “a milestone in the Sudanese people’s struggle against oppression and terrorism”. 

The parallel government launched under Hemedti in Darfur said it condemned any violations and would establish committees to investigate the veracity of videos of atrocities circulating online. 

Western officials, including the UK foreign secretary Yvette Cooper and Massad Boulos, US President Donald Trump’s adviser on Arab and African affairs, urged the militia to open up the area to humanitarian access and to “protect civilians”. But these entreaties from afar have had little obvious effect on the fighters on the ground. 

Critics of the west’s ineffectual response to the Sudanese civil war said that only severe pressure on the UAE, which has allegedly backed the RSF with weapons supplies and trade in gold but denies involvement, could prevent further atrocities in El Fasher. 

“It is beyond an open secret that the United Arab Emirates is arming and supporting the RSF,” said Protection Approaches, a UK-based charity that campaigns against identity-based violence. 

“The single most effective action that could bring pause to the massacre in El Fasher is for the right call from Abu Dhabi to be placed to RSF leadership,” it added. 

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025. All rights reserved.

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