Camel-mounted fighters detained a couple of hundred men near the Sudanese town of al-Fasher over the weekend and took them to a reservoir, shouting racial slurs before starting shooting, according to a man who said he was among them.
One of the captors recognized him from his school days and let him flee, the man, Alkheir Ismail, said in a video interview by a local journalist known for Reuters in the nearby city of Tawila, in the western region of Darfur.
“He told them, ‘Don’t kill him,’” Ismail said. “Even after they killed everyone else: my friends and everyone else.”
He said he had been delivering food to relatives still in the city when he was captured by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on Sunday and that, like the other detainees, he was unarmed. Reuters He could not immediately verify his account because of the conflict, but he verified earlier material obtained from the journalist.
Ismail was one of four witnesses and six aid workers interviewed by Reuters who also said that people fleeing Al Fasher had been rounded up in nearby villages and that the men had been separated from the women and expelled. In an earlier account, one of the witnesses said gunshots were then heard.
Activists and analysts have long warned of ethnicity-based revenge killings by the RSF if they seize al-Fasher, the Sudanese army’s last stronghold in Darfur.
The U.N. human rights office shared other accounts on Friday, estimating that hundreds of civilians and unarmed combatants may have been executed. These murders are considered war crimes.
The FAR, whose victory in al-Fasher marks a milestone in Sudan’s two-and-a-half-year civil war, has denied such abuses, saying the accounts have been fabricated by its enemies and leveling counter-accusations against them.
RSF says the men were taken away for questioning
Reuters has verified at least three videos posted on social media showing men in RSF uniforms shooting unarmed captives and a dozen more showing clusters of bodies after apparent shootings.
A senior RSF commander called the accounts “media exaggeration” by the army and its allied fighters “to cover up their defeat and loss of al-Fasher.”
RSF leaders had ordered investigations into any violations committed by RSF members and several had been arrested, he said, adding that the RSF had helped people leave the city and had asked aid organizations to help those who stayed.
He said soldiers and fighters posing as civilians had been taken away for interrogation. “There were no murders as claimed,” the commander said. Reuters in response to a request for comment.
The capture of al-Fasher by the RSF reinforces the geographical division of a country already reduced by the independence of South Sudan in 2011, after decades of civil war.
In a speech on Wednesday night, RSF chief Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo called on his fighters to protect civilians and said violations would be prosecuted. He appeared to acknowledge the reports of arrests and ordered the release of those detained.
Most of the fighters who stopped the RSF advance on al-Fasher came from the Zaghawa ethnic group, whose feud with the mostly Arab RSF fighters dates back to the early 2000s, when, as Janjaweed militias, they were accused of atrocities in Darfur.
Alex de Waal, a genocide expert and Darfur specialist, said the acts reported by the RSF in al-Fasher seemed “very similar to what they did in Geneina and elsewhere,” referring to another Darfur town that the RSF took during the early stages of the last war, as well as at the beginning of the conflict in the early 2000s.
The United States said RSF had committed genocide in Geneina and that the attack is being investigated by the International Criminal Court. The Sudanese military and others accuse the UAE of supporting the RSF, accusations the Gulf state denies.
“We cannot say that they are alive”
Mary Brace, a protection adviser for Nonviolent Peaceforce, an NGO working in Tawila, said those arriving “are women, children and older men in general,” adding that trucks organized by RSF have taken some people from Garney to Tawila while others have been taken to other locations.
RSF on Thursday released a video that it said showed the provision of food and medical aid to displaced people in Garney. Aid workers said the force could also be trying to keep people in the cities it controls to attract foreign aid.
Some 260,000 people were still in Al Fasher at the time of the attack, but only 62,000 have been accounted for elsewhere, and only several thousand of them in Tawila, which is controlled by a neutral force.
In another of the testimonies obtained and verified by ReutersTahani Hassan, a former hospital cleaner, said she fled to Tawila early Sunday after her brother-in-law and uncle were killed by stray bullets.
Along the way, she and her family were stopped by three men in RSF uniforms who searched them, beat them and insulted them, she said.
“They beat us hard. They threw our clothes on the floor. Even me, as a woman, was searched,” she said, adding that her food and water were also spilled on the floor.
They finally reached Garney, where the fighters separated the women and children from the men, most of whom they never saw again, including her brother and brother-in-law.
“We can’t say they are alive because of the way they treated us,” Hassan said. “If they don’t kill you, hunger will kill you, thirst will kill you.”
