Report spotlights civilian slaughter in Sudan war

NAIROBI, Kenya — Gunmen spraying bullets at fleeing children; a mother with a child on her back shot dead; terrified teenage girls summarily executed as they fled a massacre in the Darfur city of El Geneina — all deaths meticulously documented in a devastating Human Rights Watch report that may be a grim foreshadowing for the next city under siege in Sudan’s civil war.

The report, released Thursday, is the first comprehensive documentation of the scale of the attacks on El Geneina that culminated in its November capture by Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group now fighting the nation’s armed forces.

Researchers interviewed more than 200 people and drew on visual evidence and satellite imagery to document mass killings and ethnic cleansing of the Black African Masalit tribe. The United Nations has said between 10,000 and 15,000 people were killed by the RSF in El Geneina, a city of around 540,000.

El Fashir, the final regional capital in the western Darfur region still under government control, has now been surrounded by the RSF and fears a similar fate.

“We saw what happened in El Geneina, so we fear dying in a horrific way as well,” said Ahmed Saleh, who has volunteered for a local self-defense group. “We have no choice but to fight because we have nowhere to go if the RSF gets here.”

The people of El Fashir, home to nearly 2 million residents and 800,000 displaced civilians, say the kinds of abuses described in the report are why they are growing increasingly desperate. RSF fighters and allied militias have attacked and burned numerous villages as they encircled the city, and residents say trucks carrying food are stopped from entering unless they pay bribes at checkpoints.

“The whole area around me is on alert, and almost all of the young men carry weapons,” Saleh said. “There is no place for us other than El Fashir. We cannot leave. We can only be buried here.”

The 13-month-old civil war pits Sudan’s military, led by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, against the paramilitary RSF and its allied militias. In the vast arid western region of Darfur, regional capitals have fallen one after the other to the RSF, including El Geneina in November.

Survivors who escaped the city told Human Rights Watch researchers that RSF fighters and their allies had fired into columns of fleeing civilians, and one described children and infants ripped from their parents’ arms before the family was slaughtered.