Rebels release videos of mass killings in Darfur and the world watches

On October 27, a video spread on social media showing at least nine men sitting in a row next to a dirt road in the city of El Fasher, in the Darfur region of Sudan. Their thin wrists dangle above their knees. They are exhausted and defeated, detained by long-haired militiamen in camouflage pants, one of whom waves a whip over his head. Another person, Al-Fatih Abdullah Idris, nicknamed Abu Lulu, begins shooting a Kalashnikov assault rifle at the line of prisoners. The last man, in a last-second protective reaction, ducks his head and places his hands on top of it, but bullets push him back, and other militiamen join in, firing repeatedly at the bodies. Abu Lulua posted the video.

Abu Lulu holds the rank of brigadier general in the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group that broke away from the Sudanese Armed Forces and, since April 2023, has been fighting against it for control of Sudan, a gold-rich country in northeastern Africa. On the day the videos were posted, Abu Lulu and other fighters were celebrating taking control of the city. The siege lasted five hundred days, more than three times as long as the Siege of Stalingrad. The Rapid Support Forces used drones and artillery provided by the United Arab Emirates. In early May, the militia began building a thirty-five-mile-long berm around the city, to prevent the entry of food and humanitarian aid; People have survived on grass and animal feed ever since. There were one million people living in El Fasher when the RSF arrived. It was still home to 260,000 people in late October, when the last members of government forces began to flee the city, leaving it open to the Rapid Support Forces, and the group distanced itself from the city. Abu Lulu After the fall of the city, it was said that she arrested him. The island He stated that he has since been released; Keep posting on social media.

“The world has not yet realized how big El Fasher is,” Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Human Research Laboratory at the Yale School of Public Health, told me. Raymond’s team has been tracking atrocities in Sudan using satellite images from… NASA and commercial sources. The team’s analysis indicates that since the fall of El Fasher, the Rapid Support Forces have carried out mass killings. “In some cases, if someone is shot while running, and you take a satellite image of them, it looks like a ‘C’ or a ‘J,’ because they fall and hit the ground on their knees or on their side in a fetal position,” Raymond told me. Satellite images show a spread of the letters “C” and “J”, with bloodstains appearing from space. “It’s simple math here,” he said. “We’re talking about tens and tens of thousands of potential deaths in five days.” The sand wall built to keep aid out of El Fasher has now made it difficult to escape the city; It is known that only thirty-five thousand people did this. Raymond’s team now refers to El Fasher as Killbox.

Many of El Fasher’s residents were members of Sudan’s non-Arab ethnic minorities, which were targeted by the RSF, a core of nomadic Arabs, throughout the war. The Fur and Zaghawa, who are black Sudanese, were at the front of the RSF’s line of fire, although the militia attacked members of other non-Arab groups, such as the Berti, as well. Speaking by phone from Cairo, Al-Taher Hashim, a Sudanese human rights activist who helped organize a soup kitchen in El Fasher and distribute aid across Darfur, told me: “They are ethnic cleansing. They are killing and destroying.”

Throughout the beginning of the last week of October, RSF fighters posted videos of the killings. In one of them, they chant “Allahu Akbar” over corpses, wave signs of victory and raise their rifles. In another case, they force men to dig their own graves. In many ways, the RSF continues the tradition of mass atrocities. In the early 2000s, its predecessor organization, a militia known as the Janjaweed, committed genocide in Darfur that killed about three hundred thousand people. Hashim and his family, members of the Zaghawa, were forced to flee to El Fasher. Two of his brothers were killed. “After nearly twenty-three years, the genocide has never ended,” he told me. “The world just stood there watching, and took no concrete action.”