The Succession

On October 6, 2025, the International Criminal Court convicted Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman — known as Ali Kushayb — on twenty-seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Darfur between August 2003 and April 2004. Murder, rape, torture, forcible transfer, persecution on ethnic and gender grounds. The first ICC conviction for Darfur. Twenty years in prison. The machinery of international criminal justice had taken twenty-two years from the crimes to the verdict, but it had arrived.

Twenty days later, on October 26, the Rapid Support Forces conquered El Fasher — the last defended city in Darfur, the capital of North Darfur State, the city the United Nations had spent eighteen months warning would fall. The RSF killed more than six thousand people in three days. Forty-four hundred inside the city. Sixteen hundred on the exit routes as civilians fled. Mass executions at hospitals. Mass executions at the university. The UN Fact-Finding Mission, publishing its findings the following February, identified three of five acts of genocide. Genocidal intent was “the only reasonable inference.” The Mission used the phrase “hallmarks of genocide” rather than “genocide” — a distinction that matters in the legal architecture and nowhere else.

The organization convicted in The Hague on October 6 and the organization that destroyed El Fasher on October 26 is the same organization.

Ali Kushayb was a Janjaweed commander. The Janjaweed were the Arab militias that Omar al-Bashir armed and directed against non-Arab communities in Darfur beginning in 2003 — Fur, Zaghawa, Masalit. The pattern was specific: men killed, women raped, villages burned, livestock taken, wells poisoned. The targeting was ethnic. The UN Commission of Inquiry documented it by 2005. The ICC indicted al-Bashir in 2009. Kushayb was surrendered to the ICC in 2020. In August 2013, al-Bashir formalized the Janjaweed networks into a new institution: the Rapid Support Forces. He appointed Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo — Hemeti — as commander. Hemeti had been running Janjaweed operations. The rebranding gave the militia a budget line, a chain of command that reported to the presidency, and a name that sounded institutional rather than ethnic. The personnel didn’t change. The targeting doctrine didn’t change. What changed was the letterhead.

When al-Bashir was overthrown in 2019, the RSF didn’t dissolve. It became a faction in the Sovereignty Council. When the 2021 military coup consolidated power, the RSF participated. When the civil war began in April 2023, the RSF fought the Sudanese Armed Forces for control of the state. And when the RSF besieged El Fasher for eighteen months — cutting food, water, and medical access systematically before the final assault — it reproduced the same ethnic targeting the Janjaweed had used in 2003. Non-Arab communities identified for killing. Arab women spared while non-Arab women were not. The operational pattern has a twenty-two-year continuity.

This is the succession the title names. Not a succession of leaders. A succession of the atrocity itself — persistent across every institutional reinvention designed to contain it. The Janjaweed were documented. They were renamed. The RSF was deployed. It was investigated. Its predecessor was convicted. The original architect, al-Bashir, governed under ICC warrant for a decade. The current commander, Hemeti, is sanctioned by the United States — individual sanctions, seven RSF-owned companies in the UAE designated — but carries no ICC arrest warrant. The ICC Prosecutor has announced steps toward new warrant applications. Steps toward applications. In the time between “steps toward” and “warrant issued,” the RSF has taken control of all five states of Darfur.

The accountability architecture is not failing. It is performing exactly as designed. Courts reach what can be proved, against defendants who can be obtained, within jurisdictions that consent to participate. Kushayb surrendered himself. The evidence against him was twenty years deep. His conviction is legally sound. And the organization he served — the one that continued under a different name with a different budget and the same ethnic targeting doctrine — is not reachable by the same machinery, because the machinery was built to process individuals, not institutions. The ICC prosecutes persons. The Janjaweed is not a person. The RSF is not a person. The ethnic targeting doctrine that migrated from one to the other is not a person. What can be named, charged, and confined to a cell in The Hague is always a subset of what produces the killing.

I wrote on March 11 that the gap between Sudan’s legal findings and its battlefield reality is not indifference but calculation — Burhan’s calculation that military momentum outweighs diplomatic process. That remains true. But the gap I failed to name then is prior to Burhan’s calculation. It is the gap between what the accountability system can reach and what the perpetrator institution has become. Kushayb was reachable because he was a mid-level commander from two decades ago. Hemeti is unreachable — for now — because he is a head of state in all but title, commanding a force that controls territory the size of France, financed through UAE-based gold channels and property holdings that the sanctions regime has designated but not dismantled. The distance between Kushayb’s cell and Hemeti’s operational freedom is not a failure of evidence. It is a structural feature of a system that processes history while the present continues.

On March 28, the RSF killed sixteen civilians in El Fasher in ethnically targeted attacks. Three women among the dead. Three mass graves on the city outskirts. On March 29, the RSF and SPLM-N shelled Dilling in South Kordofan — fourteen killed, five of them children, twenty-three wounded. Health centers, schools, crowded market areas.

The conviction was handed down in October. The sentence — twenty years — was pronounced in December. The killings in El Fasher continued in January, February, March. The succession does not pause for the verdict. It has never paused for the verdict. The distance between “convicted” and “stopped” is not a gap that better institutions will close. It is the architecture itself — a system that reaches backward, into the provable past, while the organization it convicts reaches forward, into the next city.

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