ICC to deliver verdict on feared former Sudanese militia chief
Judges at the International Criminal Court (ICC) are delivering their verdicts in the trial of a feared former Sudanese militia leader who allegedly oversaw war crimes in Darfur, according to AP on October 6th.
Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman, more commonly known by his nom de guerre Ali Kushayb, faces 31 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity that were allegedly carried out during the Darfur genocide between April 2004 and August 2023.
These counts include rape, murder, torture, persecution, and intentionally attacking civilians. Prosecutors claim that Abd-Al-Rahman was a senior commander in the widely feared Janjaweed militias, who are notorious for their vicious history.
In 2003, Sudan’s then-dictator Omar Al-Bashir sent the Janjaweed, which translates into ‘Devils on Horseback’, to Darfur to repress a civilian-led insurrection. The uprising was led by ethnic Africans to put an end to systematic oppression and centralised power by the Arab Sudanese elite.
In the ensuing conflict, the government deployed scorched-earth tactics, raids, and aerial bombing campaigns that killed up to 300,000 people and displaced another 2.7 million.
The Janjaweed contributed to much of the violence, going from village to village on horseback, inflicting atrocities on the inhabitants on behalf of the government. Al-Bashir himself was charged with an array of crimes by the ICC, including genocide.
During Abd-Al-Rahman’s trial, judges heard 56 witness testimonials describing the carnage inflicted on civilians in Darfur, including the use of rape as a weapon to humiliate women.
One of the witnesses said that during a massacre, Abd-Al-Rahman told his fighters to “repeat, repeat for these people. Maybe there are some that you have missed.”
Defense lawyers have called 17 witnesses to argue that he is “a no one” who had no connection whatsoever to the Janjaweed or the Darfur genocide.
Abd-Al-Rahman has denied all of the charges against him, telling the court that they have the wrong man.
In December 2024, he told a court hearing that “I am not Ali Kushayb. I do not know this person… I have nothing to do with the accusations against me,” according to Al-Monitor on October 5th.
After a new Sudanese government announced that it would comply with the ICC’s investigation into the Janjaweed in February 2020, Abd-Al-Rahman fled from Sudan to the Central African Republic.
He eventually handed himself in as, after being in hiding for two months, he was “afraid of being arrested” because he thought the authorities would have killed him.
The root causes of the 2003 Darfur genocide are still tearing Sudan apart today. The Rapid Support Forces, an active paramilitary group in Sudan, was born out of the Janjaweed.
They are currently locked in a highly destructive civil war against the military which erupted in April 2023 after a power struggle turned violent. The group controls most of the Darfur region and has been accused of ethnically motivated attacks against civilian minority groups.
The UN has warned that such activity may amount to genocide, making it clear that scars of Sudan’s darkest period have been reopened.
AP, Maghrebi.org, Al-Monitor
Want to chase the pulse of North Africa?
Subscribe to receive our FREE weekly PDF magazine
