A genocide may have been committed in the West Darfur city of El Geneina in one of the worst atrocities of the year-long Sudanese civil war, according to a report released by Human Rights Watch (HRW).
It says ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity have been committed against ethnic Massalit and non-Arab communities in the city by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and its Arab allies.
The report calls for sanctions against those responsible for the atrocities, including the RSF leader, Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, widely known as Hemedti.
The UN says about 15,000 people are feared to have been killed in El Geneina last year.
Warning: This article contains details that some readers may find distressing
The HRW report documents evidence of a systematic campaign by the RSF and allied militias to remove Massalit residents from El Geneina.
Witnesses described how the RSF rounded up and shot men, women and children who attempted to escape the ethnic violence in the restive city.
At least "thousands of people" were killed and "hundreds of thousands" left as refugees between April and November 2023, the 218-page report said.
"The events are among the worst atrocities against civilians so far in the current conflict in Sudan," it added.
The US and the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court have talked about war crimes in Darfur but they have not specifically mentioned genocide.
The BBC has spoken to people from El Geneina who say they were victims of ethnic violence.
One man told us he had joined others who fled to a central gathering place after sites were attacked in different parts of the city. He said the RSF had a base nearby and eventually began bombing this area, Mudaris, with heavy guns.
“We buried all the dead people at night,” he said, “one day 186 people, another day 80, another day 50.”
The man, who asked not to be named, is now sheltering in neighbouring Chad.
He told the BBC that armed men raped his wife, using degrading language as they did so: “They said: 'Now we are your husband, your people have all have been killed. You can be the servants of our wives and clean our houses.'”
The HRW report says that RSF fighters and militias used derogatory racial slurs against Massalit and other racial groups, telling them that the land was not theirs and that that it would become "the land of the Arabs".
It says the attacks culminated in a large-scale massacre on 15 June last year, when the RSF and its allies opened fire on a convoy of civilians desperately trying to flee.
A 17-year-old boy described to HRW the killing of 12 children and 5 adults from several families: “Two RSF forces … grabb[ed] the children from their parents and, as the parents started screaming, two other RSF forces shot the parents, killing them. Then they piled up the children and shot them. They threw their bodies into the river and their belongings in after them.”
The current violence has erupted out of a long history of tensions over resources between non-Arab farming communities, including the Massalit, and Arab pastoralist communities.
Those tensions were harnessed by the former government of Omar al Bashir. It created Arab militias known as the Janjaweed to put down a Massalit rebellion in the 2000s, out of which the RSF was eventually formed. Many of the people who fled Janjaweed attacks 20 years ago found refuge in camps for internally displaced persons in El Geneina.
Sudan’s civil war has helped reignite the violence. It began as a power struggle between the leaders of the Sudanese army, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary RSF, Gen Hemedti, but has since drawn in other ethnic militias.
Gen Hemedti has denied his fighters deliberately attacked civilians.
But HRW says he is among those with command responsibility over the forces which carried out the atrocities.
The HRW researchers interviewed more than 220 Sudanese refugees in Chad, Uganda, Kenya, and South Sudan, as well as remotely between June 2023 and April 2024.
They also reviewed and analysed over 120 photos and videos of the events, satellite imagery, and documents shared by humanitarian organisations to corroborate accounts of the abuses.
The rights body called for further investigations to find out if there was an intention to eliminate the Massalit community, which would indicate a genocide.
Last June, West Darfur Governor Khamis Abakar was killed hours after accusing RSF of committing genocide. He is the most senior official known to have been killed since the conflict began in April.
The RSF says it is not involved in what it describes as a "tribal conflict" in Darfur.
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