The perpetrators
Sudan’s military and a powerful paramilitary — both armed by foreign powers — have spent almost two years at war, and their battle has laid waste to the country. Many tens of thousands of civilians have been killed. Close to 12 million people have been displaced. There is famine.
The U.S. and the U.N. have accused both sides of war crimes — attacks on civilians, destruction of hospitals and schools, starvation as a weapon of war and sexual violence. How bad were these crimes and who was responsible? The Visual Investigations team wanted to find out. We’ve just published the results of a six-month investigation documenting what we discovered.
We focused on one side, the Rapid Support Forces (R.S.F.), a paramilitary group, for a few reasons. First, evidence suggested that it was carrying out crimes against humanity. Second, observers outside the country didn’t have a good sense of who, below the top level, was running the group. And third, the leaders were going unpunished.
I’ll share what we found in today’s newsletter.
Unmasking the commanders
We started with two questions: Who were the men behind the massacres, and what did we know about their abuses? The R.S.F. is not a regular army, so it doesn’t publicize a formal command structure.
We found something that could help us build an org chart: a profusion of conflict videos. There are two kinds. Officers were casting themselves as noble defenders of democracy in slick propaganda videos. At the same time, rank-and-file soldiers were posting trophy videos in private channels that showed them abusing civilians.
All this helped us identify at least 20 R.S.F. commanders and locate many of them at or near several atrocities. We verified and geolocated hundreds of videos. With the help of others — Sudan specialists, U.N. investigators, experts on paramilitary groups and researchers with the Centre for Information Resilience — we showed the leaders were directing forces who repeatedly broke the laws of war.
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| A satellite image of the blackened foundations of homes, burned during attacks by the R.S.F. Airbus DS |
This can be painstaking work. We had one video of a commander supposedly from an October attack that killed 100 people in a village in Gezira state. By comparing trees, telephone poles, communications towers and freshly cut haystacks with archival satellite imagery, we verified the exact location. It proved that this commander and his fighters were in that area, at that time.
We didn’t rely merely on visual forensics. Much of Sudan is too dangerous to report from, but we spoke to many witnesses and victims of the violence. Some had fled to a network of camps in Chad that is now home to 700,000 Sudanese refugees. Their testimony corroborated a pattern of abuse by the fighters.
We even spoke to an R.S.F. commander in El Fasher — one of the conflict’s hot spots — who gave details about two commanders we identified in the videos and confirmed that they were taking orders from the top R.S.F. leaders. (He pushed back when we said the group had targeted civilians.)
What next?
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| Camps in Adré, Chad. Djibrine Haidar Kabadio for The New York Times |
It’s hard to know if or when this conflict could end. Washington brokered peace talks in August, but neither side participated. Meanwhile, foreign powers including the U.A.E. have accelerated the conflict by sending arms, as my colleagues Declan Walsh and Christoph Koettl have reported.
But these videos may eventually become evidence for violations of international law. This year, the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court appealed to the public for evidence of atrocities from the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region.
“The I.C.C. is kind of at present the only game in town when it comes to individual criminal responsibility,” Beth Van Schaack, the top State Department official focused on global criminal justice, told us. She said Washington would consider proposals to expand the current I.C.C. mandate, which is limited to Darfur, to the entire country. But in his first term, Donald Trump imposed sanctions on that court and some of its staff. His administration is unlikely to favor a new I.C.C. case. (Even if it did, international justice moves slowly.)
For now, the two sides are still fighting. And just this month, they’ve both been accused of more attacks on residential areas and on civilians.