Eyewitness testimonies describing how screaming children were piled up and shot amid a genocidal campaign by paramilitary forces in Sudan have emerged as part of a skin-crawling Human Rights Watch report published today.
Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), along with allied militias, have been widely accused of ethnic cleansing and committing crimes against humanity since war between the RSF and the regular army broke out in April 2023.
The bitter civil war has killed tens of thousands, including up to 15,000 in the West Darfur town of El-Geneina, according to UN experts, and seen various atrocities including mass torture and rape.
Reporting of the harrowing conflict was limited late last year after journalists were driven out of the region, persecuted and in some cases murdered.
But now the HRW report has shed new light on the abhorrent crimes conducted by the RSF against the Massalit community in the west of the country, along with other non-Arab groups.
In one passage, a 17-year-old boy described the killing of 12 children and five adults from several families: ‘Two RSF forces … grabbed the children from their parents and, as the parents started screaming, two other RSF forces shot the parents, killing them.
‘Then they piled up the children and shot them. They threw their bodies into the river and their belongings in after them.’
For more than a year, Sudan has suffered a war between the army, headed by the country’s de facto leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), commanded by his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.
The country ‘is experiencing a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions’ as a result, with famine threatening and more than 8.7 million people uprooted, according to the UN.
Both sides have been accused of war crimes, but the RSF is believed to have conducted a programme of ethnic cleansing of non-Arab communities, particularly the ethnic Massalit group, in the west of the country.
Descriptions of the heinous crimes were part of a 186-page HRW report called ‘Ethnic Cleansing and Crimes Against Humanity in El-Geneina, West Darfur, Sudan’, which painstakingly charts ‘an ethnic cleansing campaign against the ethnic Massalit and other non-Arab populations’.
From late April until early November of last year, the RSF and allied militias ‘conducted a systematic campaign to remove, including by killing, ethnic Massalit residents’, according to HRW.
Local human rights lawyers said they had tracked a pattern where fighters targeted ‘prominent members of the Massalit community’, including doctors, human rights defenders, local leaders and government officials.
HRW added that the attackers ‘methodically destroyed critical civilian infrastructure’, primarily in communities consisting of displaced Massalit.
Satellite imagery showed that since June, predominantly Massalit neighbourhoods in El-Geneina have been ‘systematically dismantled, many with bulldozers, preventing civilians who fled from returning to their homes’, HRW reported.
HRW said the attacks constitute ‘ethnic cleansing’ as they appeared to be geared towards ‘at least having them permanently leave the region’.
The context of the killings further ‘raises the possibility that the RSF and their allies have the intent to destroy in whole or in part the Massalit in at least West Darfur, which would indicate that genocide has been and/or is being committed there’, it added.
HRW called for an investigation into genocidal intent, targeted sanctions on those responsible and urged the United Nations to ‘widen the existing arms embargo on Darfur to cover all of Sudan’.
The International Criminal Court, currently investigating ethnic-based killings in Darfur, says it has ‘grounds to believe’ that both the paramilitaries and the army are committing ‘Rome Statute crimes’, which include war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
And in December, the United States said that Sudan’s rival forces have both committed war crimes in their brutal conflict, accusing the RSF of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.
Over half a million Sudanese have fled the violence from Darfur into Chad, according to the latest UN figures.
By late October, 75 percent of those crossing the border were from El-Geneina, HRW said.
Around 250 miles east of El-Geneina, all eyes are currently on El-Fasher in North Darfur, the only state capital not under RSF control.
The United States has warned of a disaster of ‘epic proportions’ if the RSF proceeds with an expected attack, as residents fear the same fate of El-Geneina will befall them.
‘As the UN Security Council and governments wake up to the looming disaster in El-Fasher, the large-scale atrocities committed in El-Geneina should be seen as a reminder of the atrocities that could come in the absence of concerted action,’ said HRW executive director Tirana Hassan.