RSF Executed 25 in North Kordofan: Sudan Doctors

June 4, 2025 — The Sudan Doctors Network has demanded an independent United Nations investigation after at least 25 civilians were reportedly executed by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in North Kordofan. The medical coalition described the killings as an ethnicized attack and a blatant violation of international humanitarian law, adding that survivors were still emerging from hiding in remote villages.

The appeal adds new urgency to mounting concerns that Sudan’s 26-month-old civil war is spreading from Darfur and Khartoum deeper into the country’s central states. While the RSF has repeatedly denied targeting civilians, the doctors’ group insists the North Kordofan case is different: victims were not caught in crossfire, but deliberately rounded up and killed.

According to the Sudan Doctors Network, RSF fighters arrived in a rural cluster of villages in North Kordofan last week. Witness accounts gathered by local medical workers suggest the paramilitaries separated men according to their community affiliation before shooting them at close range. Two women trying to intervene were also killed. The bodies were left in a shallow wadi, and residents were too frightened to recover them until local elders negotiated a temporary truce.

“The RSF is not fighting here; it is punishing a community,” the network’s statement read, without naming the specific ethnic group. “These were executions carried out solely because people belonged to a group the RSF sees as hostile.”

The exact number of deaths may be higher. The doctors’ network said 25 bodies had been counted, but several families reported relatives missing in the chaos that followed. Communications in the area are patchy, and RSF checkpoints have slowed the movement of aid workers and medical volunteers trying to reach killed and wounded.

The request for a UN-led investigation is significant because the Sudan Doctors Network has historically avoided naming warring parties unless the evidence is overwhelming. Throughout the conflict, it has documented bombings, sexual violence, and attacks on hospitals, but it has reserved the language of “execution” and “ethnic targeting” for cases where patterns are unmistakable.

International humanitarian law is unambiguous: executing any person hors de combat — including civilians or captured fighters — is a war crime. Legal analysts point out that when such acts are committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack on a civilian population, they may also amount to crimes against humanity. The North Kordofan attack, if confirmed, would fit that description more clearly than many other atrocities reported during the conflict.

The network’s call goes beyond a simple demand for justice. It has asked the UN International Independent Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan to secure the site before evidence is lost to seasonal rains or military movements. It also urged the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to assign monitors to North Kordofan’s southern districts, where the RSF is believed to be operating with little outside scrutiny.

“An investigation will only mean something if it reaches the ground,” the statement said. “The victims deserve more than condemnation from an air-conditioned office in Geneva.”

The timing matters. North Kordofan has become a strategic corridor since the war expanded. The state sits between RSF-controlled areas in Darfur and territories still contested around Khartoum. RSF forces have been reinforcing their position in El-Obeid, the state capital, and there are signs that they are trying to consolidate control over rural areas before the June-October rainy season disrupts movement. The tactic appears aimed not merely at military advantage but at creating a buffer zone by forcing civilians to flee.

Targeted depopulation has been a recurring feature of the RSF’s methods, observers say. In West Darfur’s capital, El Geneina, ethnically motivated attacks in 2023 left thousands dead and emptied entire neighborhoods. In El Fasher, North Darfur, RSF forces have laid siege to a city where hundreds of thousands of displaced people have taken shelter. North Kordofan is now showing signs of the same pattern, just as the group widens its influence toward another humanitarian catastrophe.

The RSF, which grew out of the Janjaweed militias mobilized by the Sudanese state during the Darfur conflict of the 2000s, has a long history of ethnicity-based violence. International prosecutors have investigated many of the same leaders now commanding RSF operations in Kordofan. The newest allegation, however, could extend the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction beyond the Darfur crisis if proven to be a distinct and separate pattern of atrocity.

Humanitarian access to North Kordofan has been minimal for months. The military government has restricted aid convoys in some areas, while the RSF has harassed medical staff and looted equipment in others. The Sudan Doctors Network said at least three clinics in the vicinity of the attack were already non-functional before the incident, leaving wounded survivors with almost no access to surgical care.

“We are not even sure the death toll can be verified,” one coordinator with a local health NGO said. “There is no security guarantee for our teams, and the phone network is unreliable outside the towns. The only sources are people who walked for hours to reach a phone.” His account, gathered in a health coordination meeting, was shared with journalists on condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation.

The UN has struggled for years to build a coherent Sudan strategy because of deep splits on the Security Council. Some member states have criticized both the armed forces and the RSF for atrocities, while others have favored a softer stance to protect diplomatic channels. That division has allowed severe crimes, including the reported executions in North Kordofan, to be met mostly with concern rather than preventive action.

What could shift the calculus, analysts argue, is more verified evidence and increased pressure from African neighbors. Several countries bordering Sudan have begun to worry that the conflict will spill over their frontiers. A credible UN investigation in North Kordofan would test whether the international community can set aside geopolitical interests to confront patterns that critics say are once again reaching the scale of genocide.

In the meantime, the Sudan Doctors Network is pleading with local communities to document names and locations. It has started an emergency hotline for North Kordofan residents, though coverage is limited. The group says its primary goal is preservation of evidence — not only for a tribunal, but also for memory.

“Our duty is not to call for revenge,” the statement concluded. “It is to ensure that those who were killed in the village are not erased from history.”

The RSF has rejected past allegations of civilian massacres as attempts to demonize the force. It has not yet issued a detailed public response to the latest North Kordofan claims, but its media office routinely dismisses reports from civil society organizations as politically motivated. No RSF field commander has acknowledged operations in the affected villages, and Sudan’s armed forces have blamed the RSF for the attack without offering independent proof.

Until an on-the-ground mission is possible, the full truth could remain out of reach. But the doctors’ network says that delaying action has a cost — measured in burial sites that are being washed away by rain and in communities that no longer trust anyone but themselves. The demand for accountability is not new, but the place and the cruelty of this incident have made it impossible to ignore.