On a Monday announcement from the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, 15 senior military commanders affiliated with both Sudan’s rival warring factions — the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) — have been formally designated for stringent punitive measures, including full cross-border travel bans and immediate global asset freezes. The targeted measures are explicitly tied to documented atrocities perpetrated during the brutal 2025 RSF takeover of el-Fasher, a major urban hub in Sudan’s Darfur region, where widespread, systematic mass sexual violence and civilian slaughter was carried out on an unprecedented scale.
UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband emphasized in an official public statement that the new sanctions regime deliberately targets suspected war criminals on both sides of the two-year-long Sudanese civil conflict, which first erupted in April 2023 and has since escalated into the single largest active humanitarian crisis on the global stage. Miliband underscored that independent UK-funded investigative work, conducted one full year after the el-Fasher atrocities first came to light, has confirmed that rival armed groups continue to weaponize both sexual violence (including mass rape of women and minor girls) and deliberate starvation as tools of war against civilian populations across Sudan. He framed these acts as transgressions against shared global humanity, stressing that all perpetrators of such crimes must face formal accountability, and all external state backers that provide military, financial, or logistical support to Sudan’s warring parties must immediately cease all such assistance.
Official timelines confirm that on 26 October 2025, after more than 500 consecutive days of encirclement, the RSF launched a full-scale final offensive to seize control of el-Fasher. The subsequent violence produced the deadliest single massacre recorded across the entire Sudanese conflict to date. Researchers from Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab noted that the unprecedented speed and industrial, mass-scale nature of the killings in el-Fasher are comparable only to the full scope of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Multiple eyewitness accounts from survivors detail that RSF fighters, who have received substantial external backing from the United Arab Emirates (a claim the UAE has consistently and publicly denied), filmed themselves carrying out mass extrajudicial killings of unarmed civilians. Survivors also documented a litany of additional abuses: systematic gang rape of young women and adolescent girls, arbitrary execution of civilian bystanders, forced relocation of surviving civilians to makeshift medical sites to extract their blood, and widespread predatory extortion targeting ordinary residents and their family members.
The UK Foreign Office noted that the new sanctions package is also designed to amplify global awareness of the full scope of the atrocities committed in el-Fasher, ensuring these crimes are not erased from international public record. Notably, the announcement comes amid longstanding public criticism of successive UK governments for failing to hold the UAE — a longstanding close British strategic ally — accountable for its alleged support to the RSF. The United Nations’ official independent fact-finding mission on Sudan has already established reasonable, verified grounds to conclude that private companies and recruitment actors operating out of UAE territory have routed critical supplies to the RSF via transit points in Chad, southeastern Libya, and Bosaso, Somalia. Extensive prior investigative reporting from Middle East Eye has further mapped this shadowy supply network, as well as the use of military bases in Ethiopia to provide covert operational support to RSF forces.
UK sanctions Sudanese officials implicated in mass sexual violence in el-Fasher
