The non-profit Center for Information Resilience (CIR) Human rights organizationsUK Guardian The United Nations on Wednesday accused Sudan's Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fighters of gleefully posting photos of themselves committing war crimes, including burning civilian homes and torturing prisoners.
The RSF is a paramilitary group that represents one half of a splintered military junta. took control Sudanese coup 2021. The coup leaders, General Abdel Fattah Al Burhan of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), and his former deputy, General Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo of the RSF, entered a state of war in April 2023. Al Burhan is the nominal head of the Sudanese military junta, so the RSF is technically a rebel army.
The Sudanese civil war was incredibly brutal, with atrocities committed by both sides. Humanitarian disasters, It caused widespread starvation and disease among some 10 million displaced people.
RSF fighters have seized control of the Darfur region of western Sudan. carried out A brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against non-Arabs, including those of the Masalit ethnic group. A key element of this campaign has been the burning and bulldozing of Masalit homes, forcing them to flee Darfur. Some human rights activists have Assert The RSF has killed so many Massalit that they have been accused of plotting genocide.
United Kingdom Guardian and CIR Accused RSF fighters filmed themselves committing atrocities, including burning down homes and torturing prisoners, and posted the videos on social media, calling on International Criminal Court (ICC) investigators to treat the videos as evidence of war crimes.
In one of the videos, an RSF fighter stands in front of the house of the Masalit sultan and declares, “There are no more Masalits… only Arabs.” Another video shows the RSF piling up the bodies of slain civilians and using them as checkpoints in the streets of the ruined town.
The videos included shocking footage of men in RSF uniforms beating and whipping prisoners, as well as posing with bloody captives for what appeared to be “selfies”.
CIR said it has thousands of such video clips and is verifying their authenticity. Other human rights groups were not surprised that RSF would inadvertently post footage of combatants committing war crimes.
“They are doing it to show the people who they are. They are proud of themselves and their abuse. They are sending a message that you cannot defeat us, we are very brave and we know how to fight,” said Adam Musa Obama of the Darfur Victims Support Group.
“We have a situation where, in the general absence of information, abusers are filming themselves and providing us with evidence of what is happening. They are probably able to do so because they have little fear of the consequences and because the costs of prosecution are far greater than the penalties,” said Alessandro Accorsi of the NGO Crisis Group.
The U.S. Department of State Accused It accuses RSF and its allied militias of “terrorizing women and girls with sexual violence, attacking them in their homes, kidnapping them in the streets and targeting those trying to flee to safety across the border.”
The State Department also acknowledges that the RSF is conducting a deliberate campaign to remove the Masalit people from Darfur.
The U.S. government also Condemn The Al-Burhan regime and the SAF have committed crimes against humanity, including starvation and displacement of civilians. said The ministry on Friday collected social media posts from SAF accounts celebrating airstrikes against civilians and inciting ethnic violence.
“SAF supporters and pro-SAF accounts frequently claim that certain tribal and ethnic communities are so-called 'incubators' of the RSF, a term they use to suggest they are working in the RSF's interests to justify violence and airstrikes,” CIR noted.
