People displaced from eastern areas of Sudan's al-Jazira state arrive to Gedaref city on Oct. 27. Hala Al-Karib estimated that nearly 1,000 civilians may have been killed by the RSF in Gezira and neighbouring Sennar state in recent days-/AFP/Getty Images
A new surge of mass killings and sexual violence has left hundreds of civilians dead in dozens of Sudanese villages in a farming region south of Khartoum, civil-society groups say.
The attacks were committed over the past five days by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the militia group that has battled Sudan’s military across the country since the war erupted last year, according to reports and briefings by the civil-society groups this weekend.
Videos on social media showed scores of dead bodies, wrapped in funeral shrouds, in one of the villages in Gezira state, a farming region and traditional breadbasket of Sudan before the war. The village assaults were retribution for the defection of a top RSF commander, Abu Aqla Keikal, who surrendered to the Sudanese military last week, the civil-society groups said.
The emerging evidence of new atrocities has sparked international condemnation. “I am shocked and deeply appalled that human-rights violations of the kind witnessed in Darfur last year – such as rape, targeted attacks, sexual violence and mass killings – are being repeated in Gezira state,” said the United Nations humanitarian co-ordinator in Sudan, Clementine Nkweta-Salami, in a statement this weekend.
“These are atrocious crimes. Women, children, and the most vulnerable are bearing the brunt of a conflict that has already taken far too many lives.”
She said RSF fighters reportedly shot at civilians indiscriminately, perpetrated acts of sexual violence against women and girls, committed widespread looting of markets and homes and burned down farms.
“The dreadful images coming from Gezira in Sudan are alarming,” said the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, in a social-media post on Sunday.
One village alone, Al-Sireha, suffered at least 124 deaths and 100 injuries when the RSF attacked it, Sudanese activists said.
An independent Sudanese media outlet, Ayin, reported that the RSF set up guns and artillery weapons on village rooftops and fired indiscriminately at civilians.
Hala Al-Karib, a Sudanese women’s rights activist who leads the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa, estimated that nearly 1,000 civilians may have been killed by the RSF in Gezira and neighbouring Sennar state in recent days.
“Over the past week, the RSF has conducted horrible war crimes that are close to acts of genocide, in our view,” she told an online media briefing on Saturday.
Despite a lack of internet access in the region, her group was able to document 25 cases of sexual violence in less than three days, and it has received reports of women dying by suicide because of gang rapes that they suffered, Ms. Al-Karib said.
The RSF attacks have also targeted the region’s agricultural infrastructure by looting villages, burning farmland and destroying irrigation canals, she said.
“I strongly believe these acts would not continue to happen if not for the silence of the international community,” she told the briefing, organized by the Sudanese American Physicians Association.
One man told the briefing that his relatives in Gezira state had fled their village on the Blue Nile after seeing RSF fighters arriving on dozens of motorcycles and in armoured vehicles and then firing into homes and stealing cars, cattle and farm produce. The streets were crowded with the wounded, he said. The Globe and Mail is not identifying him because his family members are at risk of retribution.
Both sides in the Sudan conflict have been accused of war crimes and atrocities. The Sudanese military has often sent its warplanes on indiscriminate bombing attacks in major cities, human-rights groups say.
As many as 150,000 people may have been killed in the war, according to the U.S. Special Envoy for Sudan, Tom Perriello. Much of the fighting has centred on the capital, Khartoum, and the western region of Darfur, but it has often sprawled into other regions such as Gezira.
“The war has now reached one of its most brutal cycles,” said Yasir Yousif Elamin, president of the Sudanese physicians group.
The UN has voiced concern at evidence that foreign countries are shipping weapons to both sides in the war. Those concerns were reinforced last week when a Sudanese military cargo plane crashed in Darfur region with two Russian crew members on board.
The armed attacks are far from the only threat in Sudan after 18 months of war. Sudan has become both the world’s largest hunger crisis and the world’s worst displacement crisis, UN agencies say.
More than 11 million people – nearly a quarter of Sudan’s population – have been forced to flee their homes, taking shelter inside the country or across borders in neighbouring countries.
The Zamzam refugee camp in North Darfur has been officially declared a famine zone, and 14 other regions across Sudan are “teetering on the brink of famine,” the UN children’s agency and the UN refugee agency said in a joint statement on Friday.
“There are 3.7 million children under 5 projected to suffer from severe acute malnutrition this year alone who are in urgent need of life-saving treatment,” the statement said.
“These children are already weakened by hunger. If not reached soon, these children are 11 times more likely to die from preventable diseases than their healthier peers inside Sudan.”