The Center for Information Resilience (CIR), a non-profit human rights group, and the UK Guardian on Wednesday accused fighters from Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of gleefully posting images of themselves committing war crimes, including the burning of civilian homes and the torture of prisoners.
The RSF is a paramilitary force that represents one-half of the fractured junta that took control of Sudan 2021. The coup leaders, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and his former deputy Gen. Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo of the RSF, went to war with each other in April 2023. Al-Burhan is the nominal head of Sudan’s military government, so the RSF are technically an insurgent force.
The Sudanese civil war has been incredibly brutal, with atrocities perpetrated by both sides. The war has unleashed a humanitarian disaster, bringing widespread famine and disease to some 10 million displaced civilians.
RSF fighters have overrun Sudan’s western region of Darfur and conducted a vicious ethnic cleansing campaign against non-Arab people, including an ethnic group known as the Masalit. A key element of this campaign involves burning and bulldozing Masalit homes so they are forced to flee Darfur. Some human rights advocates argue the RSF is outright killing enough of the Massalit to be accused of attempting genocide.
The UK Guardian and CIR accused RSF fighters of filming themselves committing atrocities, including burning houses and torturing prisoners, and uploading the video to social media. They urged investigators from the International Criminal Court (ICC) to consider these videos as self-incriminating evidence of war crimes.
In one of these videos, an RSF fighter stands before the house of the Masalit sultan and declares, “There are no more Masalit … Arabs only.” Another shows the RSF piling up the corpses of murdered civilians to use as roadblocks on the streets of a deserted town.
Some of the videos included disturbing images of men in RSF uniforms beating and whipping prisoners, and seemingly taking “selfies” while posing with bloodied captives.
The CIR said it has thousands of such video clips and is working to authenticate them. Other human rights advocates were not surprised that the RSF would carelessly post footage of its fighters committing war crimes.
“They are doing it to show the people who they are. They are proud of themselves and their abuses. They are sending a message that you cannot defeat us, we are very brave, we know how to fight,” said Adam Mousa Obama of Darfur Victim Support.
“We’re in a situation where abusers are filming themselves, giving us evidence of what’s happening when we don’t have much information generally. They can do that because they probably feel little fear of consequences, and because the cost opportunity of indictment is far greater than the punishment,” said Alessandro Accorsi of the NGO Crisis Group.
The U.S. State Department has accused the RSF and its allied militias of “terrorizing women and girls through sexual violence, attacking them in their homes, kidnapping them from the streets, or targeting those trying to flee to safety across the border.”
The State Department has also acknowledged the RSF is waging a deliberate campaign to eliminate the Masalit from Darfur.
The U.S. government also accuses the al-Burhan regime and the SAF of crimes against humanity, including starving and displacing civilians. The CIR said on Friday it has collected social media posts from SAF accounts celebrating airstrikes against civilian targets and encouraging ethnic violence.
“SAF supporters and pro-SAF accounts frequently claimed that specific tribes and ethnic communities are so-called ‘incubators’ for the RSF, a term suggesting they operate in the RSF’s interests, in an attempt to justify violence and airstrikes,” CIR noted.