Sudan: Why should the Rapid Support Forces or Janjaweed be classified as a terrorist organization?
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Unfortunately, many Sudanese politicians have sought to spread a misleading perception of the Sudanese civil war, portraying it as merely a civil conflict between two rival generals vying for power. This obfuscating narrative is propagated for political reasons, ideological biases, and other reasons related to relationships with regional powers that have allied with the Rapid Support Forces.
As groups of Sudanese citizens in the United States, we seek to campaign to remove this obfuscation and bring the truth to the attention of the American public first, and to the representatives of the American people second, in the hope of classifying the Rapid Support Forces or the Janjaweed in their rightful place as a terrorist organization, thereby besieging them geopolitically and perhaps preventing them from repeating the killings of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of Sudanese people and save those who are currently threatened.
1. What is the origin of the Rapid Support Forces?
Unfortunately, the dictatorial government under the internationally convicted war criminal Omar al-Bashir (who was overthrown by the Sudanese people in a popular revolution in 2019) exploited local conflicts caused by drought between Arab herders and African farmers in the Darfur region. It recruited fighters from among the Arab herders to fight against African rebel forces. These nomadic Arab forces became known as the Janjaweed. As the conflict in Darfur intensified between 2003 and 2007, the Janjaweed committed acts of brutal violence and were involved in ethnic cleansing and extrajudicial killings. This led the International Criminal Court to issue 51 indictments against a Janjaweed militia leader named Ali Kushayb for crimes against humanity. Kushayb was arrested in 2020 and convicted of war crimes in 2025.
The dictatorial government’s relationship with the Janjaweed militias persisted throughout the Darfur crisis, culminating in their transformation into a semi-official force in 2013 under the name Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The illegitimate parliament under Omar al-Bashir then passed the Rapid Support Forces Act, effectively turning them into a parallel army that the president treated as his personal force. The RSF was also permitted to operate as a mercenary force for Saudi Arabia during the Yemen war, beginning in 2015, allowing them to forge regional ties with actors such as the United Arab Emirates. As their influence and power expanded under the leadership of the Dagalo family, the RSF gained control over a significant portion of Sudan’s gold trade. Furthermore, they developed a relationship with the Russian Wagner Group.
But, as we will see below, the structural developments in these forces have not changed the basis of their combat doctrine, which is based on mercenary violence, terrorism, and identity-based killings.
2. A timeline of some of the Rapid Support Forces’ terrorist acts:
September 2013: Brutal repression of popular demonstrations
In September 2013, the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, experienced a popular uprising calling for the downfall of Omar al-Bashir’s regime. As the demonstrations intensified, the regime deployed the Janjaweed militia to brutally suppress the protesters, ultimately enabling it to maintain its grip on power. Approximately 200 citizens were killed in these demonstrations, most of them by direct gunshot wounds to the head or chest.
sources:
From the ReliefWeb website of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
From the Amnesty International website
June 2019: The dispersal of the sit-in at the army headquarters, or the “Khartoum massacre”
In December 2018, a peaceful popular revolution swept across Sudan, leading to the downfall of dictator Omar al-Bashir. While al-Bashir had allowed the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) to be stationed in the capital, Khartoum, as a form of security for his regime, they were unable —and perhaps unwilling —to prevent his removal from power when the moment of truth arrived. Following the fall of al-Bashir’s regime in April 2019, protesters continued their sit-in outside the army headquarters in the capital, demanding a continued transition to democratic rule. On June 3, 2019, an RSF force carried out a brutal crackdown on the sit-in, resulting in dozens of deaths and numerous injuries.
sources:
From the website of the American organization “Physicians for Human Rights”
April 2023: Civil War
With the outbreak of civil war in April 2023—regardless of who started it or the details of the military battles, including the killing of soldiers by each other, which is, whether we like it or not, a legitimate aspect of war under international humanitarian law—the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) employed their usual methods of terrorizing civilians on a massive scale. This ranged from the widespread use of rape, murder, and torture as systematic means of subjugating civilians in the areas they controlled, to the extreme looting of homes and property, and the forced displacement of residents. This led to massive migrations, making the Sudanese crisis the worst in the world in terms of displacement and refugees. With the RSF’s defeat and withdrawal from Khartoum and Gezira states, high numbers of civilians returning to their areas were recorded, confirming that these terrorist forces were the cause of their displacement.
sources:
United Nations Fact-Finding Mission Report 2024:
“The report also found reasonable grounds to believe that RSF and its allied militias committed the additional war crimes of rape, sexual slavery, and pillage, as well as ordering the displacement of the civilian population and the recruitment of children below 15 in hostilities. Horrific assaults carried by the RSF and its allies against non-Arab communities – in particular the Masalit in and around El Geneina, West Darfur – included killings, torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence, destruction of property and pillage.”
June 2023: Ethnic cleansing in El Geneina and elsewhere against the Masalit tribe
As part of a broader ethnic cleansing strategy, the Janjaweed forces killed approximately 15,000 Masalit people and displaced 80% of the population of El Geneina and other neighboring towns and villages, with the number of Masalit refugees in Chad reaching nearly half a million. Numerous reports of mass graves have surfaced, and several humanitarian organizations documented a large number of bodies in the streets of El Geneina after the Janjaweed entered the city and brutally murdered the governor of Darfur, Khamis Abkar, on June 14, 2023, a crime captured on camera.
sources:
October 2024: Massacres in Al-Jazirah State and the punishment of civilians for the defection of Commander Kikel
One of the leaders of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia, Kikel, had defected and joined the Sudanese army. Regardless of the immorality of the army accepting a former criminal without accountability, this event emboldened the RSF, a terrorist force, to attack several villages with populations of no more than two thousand each, displacing their inhabitants en masse after indiscriminately killing hundreds. The largest of these massacres occurred in the village of Al-Sariha. Because the aim of the killings was to terrorize civilians and use them to punish the military (targeting the social base of Kikel’s forces), the RSF filmed their crimes and disseminated them online. The BBC used these images to identify many of the perpetrators.
Sources:
November 2025: Al-Fashir massacres
After an 18-month siege that led to widespread malnutrition and the deaths of many civilians, and following daily attacks on the city, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) entered El Fashir. Immediately upon their entry, images of extremely brutal practices, disseminated by the RSF themselves, circulated widely. Yale University, which closely monitors the situation in Darfur through satellite images, suggests that the death toll may be even higher than currently estimated. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has begun investigating widespread reports of targeted killings and other acts of genocide reminiscent of the events in Darfur between 2003 and 2007.
sources:
From the United Nations, a press conference
3. What is the meaning of “terrorism”?
Definitions of terrorism generally agree that it is a situation in which violence is used against civilians to achieve political goals or to destabilize society. Therefore, describing the actions of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), as they systematically ethnically cleanse and violate any laws of war, as ‘terrorism’ is an understatement.
4. A final word on the issue of “war between two generals”:
We know and acknowledge that the Sudanese problem is complex and involves more than one negative actor. The Sudanese people have risen up in at least three revolutions against the military juntas and their misguided leadership of the army and the nation. The most recent of these revolutions was in 2018, a revolution that we believe most signatories of this document supported and continue to support. We are not advocates of military rule, nor are we appeasing corrupt and criminal military leaders, whom we believe will one day be held accountable.
However, attempting to conflate this complexity with the undeniable reality of the terrorism and genocide perpetrated by the Rapid Support Forces is simply a case of mixing apples and oranges. For example, one cannot use legitimate criticism of the US government’s war in Iraq to justify normalizing a terrorist organization like ISIS. The same can be said of the Nigerian regime and Boko Haram, and many similar cases.
Allowing the Rapid Support Forces to exist and accepting them as merely an ordinary rebel force in a civil war “between two generals” will open the door to replicating this pattern of terrorist violence, repeating the experiences of war criminals, not only in the African Sahel but throughout the African continent and perhaps elsewhere in the world. Allowing this terrorist force to receive generous regional military support is a blatant affront to international and humanitarian law and will unleash hell upon our people, who will be forced to endure not just wars, but wars where the battleground is the bodies of civilians, devoid of any respect for the laws of war.
Together to designate the Rapid Support Forces (Janjaweed) as a terrorist organization!
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