U.N. Sanctions Four RSF Commanders Over El Fasher Siege and Atrocities

On the morning of Oct. 26, 2025, as fighters from Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) swept through the city of El Fasher, a man in desert camouflage walked among bodies in the street, grinning at a phone camera. In footage later compiled by United Nations investigators, the commander, known as Abu Lulu, boasts of killing more than 2,000 people. In other clips he appears to shoot unarmed men who are begging for mercy and pose over their corpses.

Four months later, his name and three others have been added to another list—this one drawn up in New York—as the U.N. Security Council moves, belatedly, to impose sanctions on some of the most senior figures in Sudan’s paramilitary.

Security Council committee adds commanders to Darfur sanctions list

On Feb. 24, the council’s Sudan Sanctions Committee unanimously agreed to add four RSF commanders to its Darfur sanctions list, citing their roles in an 18‑month siege and the fall of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur. The listings trigger global travel bans and asset freezes under a regime first created in 2005.

The action, quietly approved by the committee and made public as governments began to respond days later, marks the most sweeping use of U.N. sanctions against current combatants in Sudan’s war and brings the council’s measures into line with recent moves by the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom.

France, which backed the designations, said the four men are “responsible for the crimes committed during their offensives against El Fasher in North Darfur,” in a statement issued Feb. 27 by its Foreign Ministry. Paris welcomed the asset freezes and travel bans as part of an effort “to combat impunity” and help end the conflict.

Who was designated

The men now blacklisted by the U.N. include:

• Abdul Rahim Hamdan Dagalo, the deputy leader of the RSF and the brother of the force’s overall commander, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo.
• Lt. Gen. Gedo Hamdan Ahmed, known as Abu Nashuk, the RSF’s commander for North Darfur.
• Brig. Gen. Al‑Fateh Abdullah Idris, the officer nicknamed Abu Lulu and widely referred to as the “Butcher of el‑Fasher.”
• Tijani Ibrahim Moussa Mohamed, also known as Al Zeir Salem, an RSF field commander.

Under Security Council Resolution 1591, which established the Darfur sanctions regime in 2005, all U.N. member states are required to block any funds or economic resources owned or controlled by listed individuals and to prevent them from entering or transiting their territories.

Evidence cited: El Fasher siege, capture and abuses

Evidence collected by a U.N.-mandated fact-finding mission and independent experts ties each of the four commanders to the siege, capture and subsequent abuses in and around El Fasher.

Investigators say Abdul Rahim Dagalo, long considered one of the RSF’s key operational leaders, was present in the city on Oct. 26, 2025, when RSF units overran the last Sudanese Armed Forces stronghold in Darfur. Video examined by the sanctions panel appears to show him inside an RSF base in El Fasher that day, instructing his men “not to take captives but to kill everyone,” according to people familiar with the committee’s narrative summary.

The same footage reportedly shows Lt. Gen. Gedo Hamdan Ahmed at Dagalo’s side, confirming his role as one of the senior generals overseeing the final assault on the city.

For Al‑Fateh Abdullah Idris, the evidence is both extensive and graphic. U.N. experts describe him as a “key perpetrator” of atrocities in El Fasher. In a series of videos circulated on social media and authenticated by investigators, Idris appears to order his fighters to execute civilians, shoot unarmed detainees at close range, joke about the number of people he has killed and smile as he fires on men pleading for their lives. Survivors and witnesses began calling him “the Butcher of el‑Fasher” in the days after the city fell.

Moussa Mohamed is identified in U.N. documents as a field commander who appears in footage from El Fasher during the period of mass killings and abuses. While less prominent publicly than Abdul Rahim or Idris, he is described as a key part of the local chain of command.

A city encircled, then overrun

Those atrocities unfolded after a prolonged campaign that transformed El Fasher, once a hub for displaced families and aid operations, into a besieged enclave.

RSF units and allied militias effectively encircled the city in May 2024, according to U.N. reporting, gradually tightening their grip for nearly 18 months. Fighters attacked surrounding villages and displacement camps, shelled civilian neighborhoods and constructed an earthen berm around the urban area to choke off food, fuel and humanitarian supplies. Roughly 260,000 civilians were trapped inside by the time RSF forces launched their final offensive in late October 2025.

When RSF fighters broke through on Oct. 26, the U.N. fact‑finding mission says the city was subjected to “three days of horror.” Witnesses described house‑to‑house searches, summary executions and identity‑based killings targeting non‑Arab communities such as the Zaghawa and Fur, as well as widespread sexual violence.

Women and girls between the ages of 7 and 70 were subjected to gang rape, often in public or in front of family members, the mission reported. Men and boys were rounded up, abused and in many cases disappeared. Humanitarian workers were attacked, and hospitals and clinics were overrun.

U.N.-linked experts estimate that several thousand civilians were killed during the takeover of El Fasher. Some assessments put the number at more than 6,000. Only about 40% of residents managed to flee as RSF forces advanced, leaving thousands unaccounted for.

Wider international pressure—and its limits

In a report released days before the sanctions decision, the fact‑finding mission concluded that RSF conduct in El Fasher amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity and that the group’s “conduct, and inferred intent, present indications pointing to genocide.” It urged the Security Council to impose targeted sanctions and expand the existing arms embargo from Darfur to all of Sudan.

The United States had already determined in January 2025 that RSF elements had committed genocide in parts of Darfur and was moving in parallel against some of the same commanders. On Feb. 19, 2026, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control announced sanctions on three RSF officers for orchestrating the siege and capture of El Fasher, citing “ethnically motivated killings, torture, starvation and sexual violence.”

“The United States will not tolerate this ongoing campaign of terror and senseless killing in Sudan,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said at the time.

Those designations built on earlier actions by the United Kingdom and the European Union, which imposed their own measures on El Fasher perpetrators in December 2025 and January 2026, and on a previous round of U.N. sanctions on two other RSF figures in November 2024.

The new U.N. listings were approved by consensus in the council’s 1591 committee, meaning none of the 15 members—including Russia and China—moved to block them. That unanimity underscores both the gravity of the evidence around El Fasher and the political limits on what the council is currently willing to do.

Analysts note that while individual sanctions ratchet up pressure on the RSF leadership, they stop short of broader steps widely sought by human rights advocates, including a nationwide arms embargo and measures targeting states alleged to have supplied weapons or financing to the paramilitary.

“The listings are an important step in the U.N. reasserting a role for itself in Sudan,” said Cameron Hudson, a former U.S. official who has worked on Sudan policy, in recent comments. He and others have argued that the council should go further and examine whether the RSF as an organization should face terrorism designations.

Humanitarian crisis continues

For civilians in Darfur, the immediate impact of the U.N. decision is unclear. Travel bans and asset freezes can complicate commanders’ access to international banking systems, medical care abroad and foreign travel. They can also stigmatize individuals, making it harder for third countries, private security firms or commercial partners to engage with them openly.

But the measures do not directly halt military operations. RSF units have continued to carry out attacks in parts of North Darfur and Kordofan in recent weeks, and U.N. agencies warn that Sudan as a whole is sliding toward one of the world’s worst famines.

Nearly three years into the war between the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces, more than 33 million people are expected to need humanitarian assistance in 2026, according to U.N. projections. Roughly 21 million face acute food insecurity, and more than 13 million have been driven from their homes inside the country or across its borders. The World Health Organization has verified over 200 attacks on health facilities since fighting erupted in April 2023.

The RSF, formally created in 2013 from elements of the Janjaweed militias that terrorized Darfur in the early 2000s, has been repeatedly accused of mass atrocities over that period, from the razing of villages in West Darfur to the deadly crackdown on pro‑democracy protesters in Khartoum in 2019. The latest U.N. sanctions mark one of the few times the Security Council has targeted such senior figures in the force’s current leadership.

For survivors of El Fasher’s siege, the move offers a measure of recognition that their suffering has been seen and documented. It may also lay groundwork for future prosecutions, whether at the International Criminal Court or in national courts applying universal jurisdiction.

Whether four names on a sanctions list can help change the course of Sudan’s war—or prevent another city from experiencing what El Fasher did—will depend on what follows. For now, as aid workers warn of looming famine and fighting grinds on, the gap between the council’s decision in New York and the lives of civilians still trapped in Darfur remains painfully wide.