Between 10,000 and 15,000 people were killed in one city in Sudan’s West Darfur region last year in ethnic violence by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and allied Arab militia, according to a United Nations report.
In the report to the UN Security Council, inde-pendent UN sanctions monitors attributed the toll in El Geneina to intelligence sources and contrasted it with the UN estimate that about 12,000 people have been killed across Sudan since war erupted on April 15, 2023, between the Sudanese army and the RSF.
The monitors also described as “credible” accusations that the United Arab Emirates had provided military support to the RSF “several times per week” via Amdjarass in northern Chad. A top Sudanese general accused the UAE in November of backing the RSF war effort.
In a letter to the monitors, the UAE said 122 flights had delivered humanitarian aid to Amdjarass to help Sudanese fleeing the war. The United Nations says about 500,000 people have fled Sudan into eastern Chad, several hundred kilometers south of Amdjarass.
Between April and June last year El Geneina experienced “intense violence,” the monitors wrote, accusing the RSF and allies of targeting the ethnic African Masalit tribe in attacks that “may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
The RSF has previously denied the accusations and said any of its soldiers found to be involved would face justice. The RSF did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Reuters.
“The attacks were planned, coordinated, and executed by RSF and their allied Arab militias,” the sanctions monitors wrote in their annual report to the 15-member Security Council.
Reuters last year chronicled the ethnically tar-geted violence committed in West Darfur. In hun-dreds of interviews with Reuters, survivors de-scribed horrific scenes of bloodletting in El Geneina and on the 30-kilometer (18 mile) route from the city to the border with Chad as people fled.
The monitors’ report included similar accounts. They said that between 14-17 June, some 12,000 people fled El Geneina on foot for Adre in Chad. The Masalit were the majority in El Geneina until the attacks forced their mass exodus.
“When reaching RSF checkpoints women and men were separated, harassed, searched, robbed, and physically assaulted. RSF and allied militias indiscriminately shot hundreds of people in the legs to prevent them from fleeing,” the monitors said.
“Young men were particularly targeted and in-terrogated about their ethnicity. If identified as Masalit, many were summarily executed with a shot to the head. Women were physically and sexually assaulted. Indiscriminate shootings also injured and killed women and children,” according to the report. Everyone who spoke to the monitors mentioned “many dead bodies along the road, including those of women, children and young men.” The monitors also reported “widespread” conflict-related sexual violence committed by RSF and allied militia. The monitors said the RSF takeover of most of Darfur relied on three lines of support – Arab allied communities, dynamic and complex financial networks, and new military supply lines running through Chad, Libya, and South Sudan.
The UN missions for Chad, Libya and South Sudan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Complex financial networks established by RSF before and during the war enabled it to acquire weapons, pay salaries, fund media campaigns, lobby, and buy the support of other political and armed groups,” wrote the monitors, adding that the RSF used proceeds from its pre-war gold business to create a network of as many as 50 companies in several industries.
Since the war started “most of the gold which was previously exported to UAE, was now smug-gled to Egypt,” the monitors said. The new firepower acquired by the RSF “had a massive impact on the balance of forces, both in Darfur and other regions of Sudan,” the report found.—AFP
