The United States Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has recommended that the US State Department designate the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) as an Entity of Particular Concern (EPC) for the first time in its annual report.
Under the Frank R. Wolf International Religious Freedom Act of 2016, the US President is required to designate ‘non-state actors that have engaged in particularly severe violations of religious freedom’ as EPCs. Every year USCIRF publishes a list of entities it has identified as meriting EPC designation, with the decision to do so in turn resting with the US Secretary of State to whom the president has delegated the authority.
In its recommendation, USCIRF highlighted the ‘harmful effects to religious freedom and Sudan’s diverse religious and ethnic communities’ caused by the RSF’s campaign of mass atrocities and widespread human rights violations.
The recommendation by USCIRF comes two weeks after the United Nations Independent Fact-Finding Mission on the Sudan published a report that found that the RSF’s siege and actions in the aftermath of the capture of the city of El Fasher in October 2025 bore the ‘hallmarks of genocide’, namely in the militia’s systematic targeting of the non-Arab Darfuri Fur and Zaghawa communities.
CSW’s Founder President Mervyn Thomas said: ‘CSW welcomes USCIRF’s recommendation that the State Department should designate the RSF an Entity of Particular Concern. The conflict in Sudan has had a devastating impact on civilians, who have been the subjects of war crimes committed by both warring parties. The RSF merits EPC designation, given the targeted nature of attacks launched on Darfuri communities on the basis of their ethnicity or religious identity, which it threatens to replicate in the Kordofan areas, and which have caused the UN fact-finding mission to note specifically the patterns of genocide in the crimes committed in this conflict.’
The RSF and Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) have been in conflict since 15 April 2023, when violence erupted as the two forces were due to merge in line with an internationally supported framework agreement on a transition to democracy. The conflict has been termed a war on civilians and has led to the world’s largest displacement crisis. Mass killings, summary executions, sexual violence, mass graves, forced displacement, ethnic targeting and attacks on civilian infrastructure including hospitals, places of worship and humanitarian infrastructure have been documented. On 26 February the UK announced a new Coalition for Atrocity Prevention and Justice in Sudan designed to address the grave violations.
In addition to the parties to the conflict and their allied militias, there are credible reports that other countries have supported the warring parties, including the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which has supported the RSF’s offensives in Sudan by supplying arms and facilitating the trade of gold and other natural resources from Darfur in international markets.
Among the extensive evidence of the UAE’s support for the RSF are well-documented ties between the UAE’s vice-president and deputy prime minister Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan and RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan ‘Hemedti’ Dagalo. Sheikh Mansour has been described as Hemedti’s closest ally in the Emirates, and US intelligence officers claim to have intercepted regular phone calls between the two men. In January CSW launched a campaign calling on the English Premier League to hold Sheikh Mansour to account for these connections in light of his ownership of Manchester City Football Club.
Mervyn Thomas said: ‘Both the RSF and the SAF are deemed to have adopted strategies that amount to war crimes, and have also gravely undermined the right to freedom of religion or belief through attacks on places of worship. Given the scale and nature of the violations being perpetrated in Sudan, we call for the creation of accountability mechanisms to bring perpetrators to justice, and for appropriate action to be taken to penalise those who are found to be supporting the parties to the conflict in breach of existing restrictive measures such as the UN arms embargos on Darfur.’