Sudan paramilitary leader addresses atrocities by his fighters
The leader of Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) apologised to the residents of El-Fasher for the massacres inflicted on them by his fighters, according to Middle East Monitor on October 30th.
Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, posted a video to his official Telegram channel after his forces seized total control of El-Fasher from the hands of the military. The commander said that he “apologises to the people of El-Fasher for the catastrophe that befell them.”
The RSF has been at war with the Sudanese military since April 2023 after a struggle for power turned bloody. El-Fasher has been under an RSF-imposed siege since May 2024 as part of the paramilitary’s now successful campaign to flush out the final military stronghold in the entire western region of Darfur.
Hemedti continued in claiming that “we were forced into this war; it was imposed upon us. But the liberation of El-Fasher is in favour of Sudan’s unity – peacefully or through war.”
He described the forces under his command as “people of peace” and urged them to refrain from killing civilians in the city. He stated that “killing a captured soldier is forbidden. As for civilians, you have no business with them.”
Hemedti announced the establishment of accountability committees to monitor and investigate abuses committed by RSF fighters in El-Fasher. He proclaimed that “we stand with the law and with-holding those who erred accountable.”
According to the BBC on January 8th, the United States – then during the Biden administration – officially accused Hemedti of inflicting “systematic” atrocities and genocide against Sudanese civilians.
Washington subsequently imposed sanctions on Hemedti and seven RSF-owned companies based in the United Arab Emirates, which is Hemedti’s principal backer.
Similarly, the UN warned in June that the risk of genocide being committed in Darfur was “very high” as the RSF frequently launched “ethnically motivated attacks against the Zaghawa, Masalit and Fur groups.”
It is evident that the group has not ceased from committing such crimes since El-Fasher fell into its hands. Upon reviewing recent satellite imagery of the RSF’s capture, the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab concluded that the city “appears to be in a systemic and intentional process of ethnic cleansing of… indigenous non-Arab communities”, only consolidating the credibility of genocide accusations.
In the images, which were publicly released by the Yale researchers, streets can be seen covered with enormous pools of blood and piles of bodies. In other words, the slaughter of civilians is of a scale large enough that it is visible from space.
AP reported on October 30th that RSF combatants executed 460 patients and their companions inside El-Fasher’s Saudi Maternity Hospital. This brutal massacre was the fourth assault on the building within the space of a month and was labelled as “horrific” by the World Health Organisation.
Middle East Monitor, Maghrebi.org, BBC, AP, Al Jazeera
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