BRUSSELS, 22 June 2026 — The International Federation for Rights and Development (IFRD) today initiates its “El-Fasher 2.0: Time to Act Before We Watch a New ‘Hallmark of Genocide’” campaign, calling on the European Parliament, the European Commission, the Council of the EU and Member States to act with immediate urgency to prevent the imminent RSF assault on El-Obeid, North Kordofan, and the mass atrocities — including systematic sexual violence against women and girls — that this assault is documented to produce.
El-Obeid is a city of 500,000 civilians, including more than 100,000 displaced people, that the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been besieging from the air since December 2025. In the past ten days alone, drone strikes have killed at least 50 civilians, destroyed the city’s power station, cut water to thousands of homes, halted hospitals, and incinerated fuel depots. In a single week of June 2026, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the UN Security Council and 29 states all warned of an imminent risk of large-scale atrocities. The High Commissioner was unequivocal: “We have seen this playbook before.”
He was referring to El-Fasher — the city the RSF took eight months ago, where the UN Fact-Finding Mission documented genocide: an 18-month siege, an earthen berm to trap civilians, and more than 6,000 killed in the first 72 hours. Sexual violence was not a side effect. It was a weapon. RSF fighters subjected women and girls aged 7 to 70 to gang rape, abduction, sexual enslavement and ransom violence, targeting them because of their non-Arab ethnicity, inside homes, at the university, inside hospitals and along escape routes. The UN Gender-Based Violence Cluster estimates 12.1 million Sudanese women and girls are now at risk of GBV — a figure that has nearly doubled since end-2024.
El-Obeid’s women and girls are next. Every precursor that preceded El-Fasher is present today at El-Obeid. The RSF’s siege expertise was professionalised by Colombian private military contractors hired through the Abu Dhabi-based Global Security Services Group (GSSG), who were present at El-Fasher’s killing sites. The RSF’s Blue Nile front is supplied from an Ethiopian National Defence Force base at Asosa, confirmed by Yale Humanitarian Research Lab satellite analysis. And the United Arab Emirates — the RSF’s principal external backer, whose role the European Parliament’s own research service maps in its April 2026 DEVE/DROI briefing — is expected to deploy its now-documented diplomatic playbook inside the Parliament the moment this campaign gains traction.
That playbook worked last November. A concerted Emirati lobbying effort in Strasbourg persuaded key parliamentary groups to strip every reference to the UAE from the Parliament’s Sudan resolution, leaving only anonymous “external enablers.” The Emirati defence rests on a humanitarian alibi that IFRD’s analysis finds unproven: against claimed figures of US$700–784 million, OCHA’s Financial Tracking Service records only approximately US$91.5 million for 2023–2025, and nothing to Sudan’s UN-coordinated response plans. The same alibi covered a UAE Red Crescent field hospital at Amdjarass in Chad which UN and US officials assessed was funnelling weapons and drones to the RSF under the protected Red Crescent emblem. The ICRC warned that this misuse could amount to a war crime.
IFRD is a proactive driver of the European Parliament’s human rights agenda on the MENA region. We have lobbied for EP resolutions, debates, written questions and co-signed letters across the Sudan, Gaza, Tunisia and Syria files. We do not issue this campaign as a commentary on events that have already happened. We issue it as an early-warning instrument — at a moment when prevention is still possible, and the window for it is measured in days.
“El-Fasher was foreseen and not prevented. The warnings were on the record, and the world watched the playbook run to its end. We are issuing this campaign because El-Obeid is now at the same point on the same curve. The battle on the bodies of El-Obeid’s women and girls will begin the same night the city falls. The difference between El-Fasher and El-Obeid can still be made — but only before the assault, not in the resolution and the condemnation that follow it.”
— IFRD Head of Advocacy and Lobbying, Andi Shehu
IFRD Calls On the European Parliament and EU Institutions To:
- Issue an urgent resolution naming El-Obeid by name, explicitly invoking the UN Fact-Finding Mission’s genocide finding on El-Fasher as the precedent and establishing that the risk of further genocidal violence remains acute;
- Deploy a EUBAM-model EU civilian monitoring mission to El-Obeid and the Kordofan corridor, with a protection-of-civilians and GBV-prevention mandate, real-time atrocity documentation, and the authority to deter a repeat of the El-Fasher pattern;
- Name the enablers: end the “external enablers” euphemism. Any El-Obeid resolution must name the UAE and the GSSG network. The Commission should publicly report on weapons-transfer routes, including via Amdjarass, Chad;
- Sanction GSSG and its leadership, closing the gap left when the Colombian recruiter A4SI was sanctioned but the Abu Dhabi-based financier was not, and extend measures to those facilitating mercenary recruitment for the RSF;
- Expand restrictive measures to the RSF’s gold and finance nodes operating in or via the UAE, with OECD-style due diligence, beneficial-ownership transparency, and anti-money-laundering risk flags on conflict-gold channels;
- Fast-track the RSF terrorist-listing evaluation the Parliament itself called for, and resist any diplomatic pressure designed to delay it;
- Condition EU–UAE trade negotiations on a verifiable end to arms and logistics flows reaching the RSF, as MEPs proposed in November 2025;
- Reject the humanitarian alibi: require audited, Sudan-specific project disclosures and waybills before any humanitarian claim is allowed to offset accountability questions;
- Ensure accountability for GBV crimes and oppose any amnesty framework — including the SAF’s current amnesty for defecting RSF commanders — that shields perpetrators of sexual violence from investigation; and
- Pre-empt the lobbying: brief MEPs, political advisers and group coordinators now, before the Emirati delegation engages, so that the Strasbourg pattern of November 2025 is not repeated in the decisive weeks ahead.
