Between 10,000 and 15,000 people were killed in one city in Sudan’s West Darfur region last year in ethnic violence by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and allied Arab militia, a United Nations report seen by Reuters on Friday showed.
In the report to the UN Security Council, independent UN sanctions monitors attributed the toll in Geneina to intelligence sources and contrasted it with the UN estimate that about 12,000 people have been killed across Sudan since war erupted on April 15, last year, between the Sudanese army and the RSF.
The monitors also described as “credible” accusations that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) had provided military support to the RSF “several times per week” via Amdjarass in northern Chad. A top Sudanese general accused the UAE in November of backing the RSF war effort.
Photo: Reuters
In a letter to the monitors, the UAE said 122 flights had delivered humanitarian aid to Amdjarass to help Sudanese fleeing the war.
The UN says about 500,000 people have fled Sudan into eastern Chad, several hundred kilometers south of Amdjarass.
Between April and June last year, Geneina experienced “intense violence,” the monitors wrote, accusing the RSF and allies of targeting the ethnic African Masalit tribe in attacks that “may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
The RSF has previously denied the accusations and said that any of its soldiers found to be involved would face justice. The RSF did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“The attacks were planned, coordinated, and executed by RSF and their allied Arab militias,” the sanctions monitors wrote in their annual report to the 15-member Security Council.
In hundreds of interviews with Reuters last year, survivors described horrific scenes of bloodletting in Geneina and on the 30km route from the city to the border with Chad as people fled.
The monitors’ report included similar accounts.
They said that between June 14 and 17, about 12,000 people fled Geneina on foot for Adre in Chad.
The Masalit were the majority in Geneina until the attacks forced their mass exodus.
“When reaching RSF checkpoints women and men were separated, harassed, searched, robbed and physically assaulted. RSF and allied militias indiscriminately shot hundreds of people in the legs to prevent them from fleeing,” the monitors said.
“Young men were particularly targeted and interrogated about their ethnicity. If identified as Masalit, many were summarily executed with a shot to the head. Women were physically and sexually assaulted. Indiscriminate shootings also injured and killed women and children,” the report said.
Everyone who spoke to the monitors mentioned “many dead bodies along the road, including those of women, children and young men.”
The monitors also reported “widespread” conflict-related sexual violence committed by RSF and allied militia.
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