Sudan’s army accused of ethnic killings after recapturing strategic city

On the morning of January 10th, Majd Montesser awoke to what he described as Sudanese army forces attacking his village of Tayba in Gezira state, setting homes ablaze. Residents fled screaming as military land cruisers weaved around tent-like huts, shooting at young and old alike.

According to multiple photos Montesser shared with Al Jazeera, most of the victims were shot in the head and chest with machine guns, while others were burned to death. The images, removed from social media for violating posting standards, could not be independently verified, but they appear to align with witness testimonies and local observer accounts. Montesser said his elderly uncle was among the 17 people killed.

“They killed 13 people inside their homes, and four others were killed as they were running away. They ran about half a kilometer before they were shot. They were all killed in such a brutal way,” Montesser told Al Jazeera. Since April 2023, a devastating civil war between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and the displacement of approximately 12 million civilians.

On January 12th, the army recaptured Wad Madani, the capital of Gezira state, finally offering local civilians hope for a return to peace and stability. For over a year, civilians in Gezira had been living under the brutal rule of the RSF. Civilians and human rights organizations accused the RSF of frequent extrajudicial killings and sexual violence, so many welcomed the army as “liberators” when they entered Wad Madani. However, reports soon emerged of army forces carrying out ethnic cleansing in the state.

Local observers and human rights groups say that the RSF typically recruits fighters from its core tribal groups in western Sudan, while the army often views civilians in these regions as collaborators or sympathizers of the RSF. The army's ethnic discrimination has led to a new wave of mass killings in Gezira state, as well as the expulsion of vulnerable groups from villages. Al Jazeera’s verification unit, Sanad, has verified four videos showing men in army camouflage either celebrating the killing of dozens of young men in civilian clothes or abusing civilians.

Two of the videos appear to capture the same incident: soldiers standing next to dozens of bloodied corpses that do not appear to be combatants. Al Jazeera was unable to verify the identities of the victims in the videos, nor could it verify the total number of deaths in the recent spate of ethnic killings. However, local observers believe that dozens, if not hundreds, have been executed so far. “What’s happening now is very dangerous. This is mass killing and ethnic cleansing,” said Jafar Mohammedin, a local activist who fled the country three months ago.

The RSF originated as tribal “Arab” militias mobilized by the army to suppress primarily “non-Arab” armed groups during the 2003 Darfur war. Non-Arab rebels were resisting the economic and political marginalization of their people, while the Arab militias carried out multiple massacres to suppress the uprising, sparking widespread accusations of genocide until the war officially ended in 2020. According to multiple reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, as well as Sudanese scholars, “Arab” and “non-Arab” are fluid categories in rural Sudan, with the former primarily referring to nomadic and pastoralist tribes and the latter to settled farmers. Both are Black and Muslim and have intermarried for centuries.

According to the UN, the army’s operation to retake Wad Madani reportedly included attacks on residents of Kanabi in Gezira state, areas that are segregated camps. The people living in Kanabi are primarily non-Arabs from Darfur, the Nuba Mountains, and what is now South Sudan. Suliman Baldo, founder of the local think tank Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker, said that these areas have traditionally been deprived of economic opportunities due to state neglect, systemic discrimination, and war. He noted that for over a century, young men from these areas have been exploited to grow cotton and crops in Gezira, one of the world’s largest irrigation schemes.

Even after the region seceded from Sudan to become its own country in 2011, young men from South Sudan still came to Gezira in search of work. “The Gezira irrigation scheme is a large mechanized farm that requires a lot of manual labor, and for over 100 years, there have been migrant workers brought in from western Sudan and the Nuba Mountains to work there,” Baldo explained. In recent months, the army has increasingly relied on some militias to lead its offensives. Local observers told Al Jazeera that two of these militias, the Sudan Shield Forces and the Baraa Ibn Malik Brigade, have carried out extrajudicial killings of unarmed people.

The Shield Forces are led by Abuagla Keikal, a former RSF commander who defected to the army in October. According to local observers and news reports, he was accused of overseeing abuses such as kidnapping for ransom, mass looting, intentional killings of farmers, and rape during his time with the RSF. “Keikal has a militia in eastern Gezira that committed some violations against civilians when he was with the RSF, and now he’s doing it again as part of the army,” said Mohamed Ahmed, a local observer whose brother was detained in one of the Kanabi camps targeted by the army.

Al Jazeera contacted army spokesperson Nabil Abdullah to ask why the army had pardoned Keikal and incorporated him and his forces into its ranks, despite his alleged history of committing serious abuses in the RSF, and to offer a chance to respond to the allegations against the army. Abdullah did not respond by the time of publication. Baraa Ibn Malik is a militia linked to the Sudanese Islamic Movement, a key part of former President Omar al-Bashir’s 30-year state apparatus. According to local observers and videos verified by several news outlets, including Al Jazeera’s own Sanad verification unit, this group has also committed some of the worst abuses to date.

In a video verified by the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR), an independent organization that conducts open-source investigations to expose human rights abuses globally, fighters wearing the insignia of Baraa Ibn Malik and other army forces are seen tying a man’s mouth with rope and pushing him off the Hantoub bridge in Gezira. As he falls into the water, they riddle his body with machine gun fire. “These are very disturbing developments, but this only reminds us of the nature of the army,” said Baldo. “The army has to do some soul-searching about its own history of killing civilians, which is continuing now,” he told Al Jazeera.

On January 15th, army leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan announced an investigation into alleged abuses committed by his forces in Gezira state. The Sudanese army also issued a statement responding to allegations of retaliatory killings in Gezira. “The armed forces condemn the individual violations that have recently occurred in some areas of Gezira state after the clearing of [RSF] in Wad Madani,” the statement read. “At the same time, the army affirms its strict adherence to international law and its keenness to hold accountable anyone involved in any violations that affect anyone in the Kanabi area,” the statement added.

Sudanese political commentator and former journalist Dalia Abdelmonem told Al Jazeera that the army’s statement ticked all the boxes in terms of committing to holding those responsible for abuses in Wad Madani accountable. However, it must behave better in order to gain international support to defeat the RSF. “This is a golden opportunity for the army to show that it is a real army, that it will only target the RSF [going forward] and not civilians, and that it will no longer abuse, torture, or carry out summary executions,” Abdelmonem said. “It has to say, ‘We are going to put a stop to this,’” she told Al Jazeera.

According to a recent report by the International Crisis Group, a think tank based in Brussels, Belgium, the RSF has had little capacity to govern the territories under its control since the war, with fighters often looting, kidnapping for ransom, and creating chaos. As a result, even though many Sudanese have deep concerns and historical opposition to the army’s poor human rights record and its refusal to fully transfer power to civilian authorities after the 2019 popular uprising that ousted Bashir, they still view the RSF as an existential threat to the country. While the army has regained popular support during the war, Baldo is not optimistic that the investigation will lead to accountability for the atrocities committed in Wad Madani, as human rights violations are a systemic issue within the army.

He referenced the beheadings in February, stating that the army promised to investigate the incident, but no one was held accountable. “If [I see] the commanders who oversaw the killings of civilians in Kanabi are held accountable, then I will believe that [the investigation] is happening. If I see results, I will believe it,” he told Al Jazeera. The army’s killing of South Sudanese migrant workers in the Kanabi camps has also sparked unrest and attacks on Sudanese nationals in South Sudan, leading to a diplomatic crisis. To date, at least 16 Sudanese nationals have been killed in retaliatory attacks in South Sudan.

Despite the army’s atrocities and other human rights violations, many civilians still rely on it to push back against the RSF, which human rights groups and UN experts say has committed more abuses. Earlier this month, the US determined that the RSF committed genocide against the non-Arab Masalit tribe in West Darfur. Now, the RSF appears to be mobilizing a counter-offensive in northern Gezira state, and according to local observers and activists, they have killed dozens of civilians in recent days.

In the village of Hasahisa, about 55 kilometers (34 miles) north of Wad Madani on the road to Khartoum, the RSF has mobilized dozens of fighters in preparation to fight the army, according to Ahmed Yasser, an activist with the Hasahisa Resistance Committee, a local community organization that advocates for civilian rights and protection. Based on information he received from a network of activists in the area, Yasser said the RSF has killed at least 40 people in the village and confiscated Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service, which allows civilians to access the internet when network services are unavailable, in order to prevent civilians from publicly talking about the abuses taking place. He added that some activists are still secretly accessing Starlink and passing information to their counterparts abroad, including him.

“I cannot reach my family, and I do not know if they are dead or alive,” Yasser, who is currently based in Cairo, Egypt, told Al Jazeera. “The [RSF] has kidnapped entire families and are now asking for ransom,” he added. Yasser acknowledged that the army is still hunting down people deemed to be RSF sympathizers in Wad Madani instead of moving north to confront the RSF and protect the civilians under siege. “Some people are wondering why the army is not doing anything [to move north],” he told Al Jazeera. “The army does not care about protecting civilians. There have been many incidents before today that have demonstrated this,” he added.