Sudanese Prime Minister Kamil Idris has called for the international community to designate the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) as a “terrorist” organisation and warned that violence could spill over to the wider region as evidence of atrocities committed by the paramilitary group in the western region of Darfur piles up.
In an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera on Wednesday, Idris slammed the RSF as “mercenaries and rebel militias” whose crimes are “unprecedented in the history of mankind”.
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“They have been condemned worldwide, but these condemnations are not enough,” Idris said. “What is needed now more than ever is to designate this group as a terrorist militia because the danger now is not only threatening Sudan, but there is a danger that it will come and threaten the security stability of Africa and the whole world.”
Idris’s government is aligned with the Sudanese armed forces (SAF) in the civil war against the RSF.
His remarks come after the RSF last week seized control of el-Fasher, the last stronghold of the Sudanese army in Darfur. The city’s fall put an end to 18 months of an RSF siege that caused a humanitarian crisis in the capital of North Darfur State.
But according to survivors, it also unleashed mass killings, summary executions, rape and other abuses by the RSF against civilians. The Sudan Doctors Network put the death toll at 1,500 in the first few days of the takeover with analysts estimating the death toll to be higher.
Satellite images analysed on Wednesday appeared to show mass graves being dug in the city. According to the International Organization for Migration’s displacement tracker, more than 80,000 people have fled the city and surrounding areas. And the United Nations estimated that hundreds of thousands of civilians were still trapped in the city as of last week.
Civilians recounted escaping the fighting in terror, fearing for their lives, navigating armed checkpoints, and being confronted with extortion and abduction as they tried to reach safety in the town of Tawila, about 50km (31 miles) west of el-Fasher.
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“We were leaving el-Fasher and it was tragic,” Najwa, a displaced woman in el-Dabbah refugee camp in Sudan’s Northern State, told Al Jazeera. “They took my husband and tortured him. They beat his face and his body. … We begged them to let us go. They took him covered in blood, unconscious. I don’t know if he is alive or dead.”
On Monday, the International Criminal Court (ICC) said it was taking “immediate steps … to preserve and collect relevant evidence for its use in future prosecutions”.
While acknowledging that some crimes have been committed by its forces, the RSF has largely denied some of the worst accusations against it and insists that it is “liberating” territory. The widespread circulation of videos documenting crimes against civilians prompted RSF authorities to jail one of its top commanders, known as Abu Lulu. On Wednesday, he was freed.
The RSF and SAF have been at war since April 2023 when a rivalry between Sudan’s army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the RSF’s commander, Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, exploded into open conflict.
The fighting quickly spread from the capital, Khartoum, and in the cities of the conflict-weary Darfur region, the violence quickly took on an intercommunal dimension, pitting armed Arab men against fighters from the Masalit ethnic group in confrontations that witnesses and survivors described as ferocious.
In the more than two years of conflict, the paramilitary group gradually seized control of Darfur’s main cities with the SAF remaining only in el-Fasher before last week. Idris described the army’s retreat from the state capital as a “tactical withdrawal”, rejecting the notion that it constituted a military defeat and expressed optimism over the army’s ability to retake the city.
He also rebuked claims that there is famine in Sudan. On Tuesday, three UN agencies said famine had spread in two areas of the country, including el-Fasher, where families are surviving on leaves, animal feed and grass.
More than 21 million people across the country are facing high levels of acute food shortages, the largest such crisis in the world, the report added.
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