Sudan: UK sanctions four paramilitary commanders over 'mass killings'

The UK has sanctioned senior commanders of Sudan's Rapid Support Forces (RSF) over suspected heinous violence including mass killings, systematic sexual violence and deliberate attacks on civilians.

The commanders were designated on Friday after documented atrocities committed by RSF troops in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur.

Deputy commander Abdul Rahim Hamdan Dagalo, the brother of RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan "Hemedti" Dagalo, is among four commanders of the paramilitary group that will face asset freezes and travel bans. Hemedti himself is not on the list of sanctions.

El Fasher was captured by the RSF on 26 October after an 18-month siege against the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). The RSF co-ordinated a campaign of enforced starvation, shelling and drone strikes with widespread civilian casualties.

In September, Sky News travelled to North Darfur and reported on volunteers being killed and arrested by the RSF for attempting to smuggle food and medicine into the city at the height of the siege. Food smuggling co-ordinators told us they had no choice but to try to save the city from "a slow genocide".

Other volunteers pleaded with us to urge the world to save Darfur and condemned the "inhumanity" of the global apathy. Many of the people we met in North Darfur lost loved ones to the RSF's violent takeover of the city.

After the capture of El Fasher, sometimes spelled Al Fashir, RSF fighters filmed themselves killing civilians in the fields around the city as they attempted to flee.

A Sky News investigation with Lighthouse Reports and Sudan War Monitor revealed that hundreds of civilians were rounded up in school yards in a town bordering the road out of the city.

A survivor told us they were forced to bury with their own hands fellow captives who were killed by the RSF on the basis of ethnicity. Satellite images analysed by Sky News found that an existing cemetery in Gurnei was extended in the days that followed 26 October, corresponding with testimony of new burials.

Yale Humanitarian Labs analysed high-resolution satellite imagery from the streets of El Fasher in the days after the RSF capture. Their analysis showed objects in the streets that correspond with corpses and large red-coloured stains likely to be blood. A civilian who escaped the slaughter told us they were stepping over bodies on their way out of the city.

An RSF insider said that at least 7,000 people were killed by their troops in the first five days of capture and that sanctioned RSF deputy commander Abdul Rahim Dagalo commanded the entire operation. Celebratory footage shared by the RSF shows him in the city only hours after it fell.

In a document naming the sanctioned individuals, the UK government said Dagalo was responsible for engaging in, supporting, or promoting "serious violations of international humanitarian law in Sudan".

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These "grave breaches" comprise "the mass killings of civilians; ethnically targeted executions; sexual violence, including gang rape; abductions for ransom; widespread arbitrary detentions; and attacks on health facilities, medical staff and humanitarian workers".

Also sanctioned was major general Osman Mohamed Hamid Mohamed, the head of the RSF's Operations Department, as well as brigadier general Al-Fateh Abdullah Idris and field commander Tijani Ibrahim Moussa Mohamed.

The RSF has been battling the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) for control of Sudan since April 2023. The paramilitary group held the capital Khartoum for two years before it was recaptured by the army in March.

Fighting pivoted to Darfur as the RSF tightened its siege on El Fasher and massacred the nearby Zamzam displacement camp before closing in on the city.

The epicentre of the war has now shifted to three fronts in the southwest Kordofan, threatening to tear Sudan into two.

The RSF has made recent gains; seizing the key city of Babanusa in West Kordofan - a railway city that connects the west, east, south and north of the country - and the oil-rich town of Heglieg on the border with Sudan's South Kordofan State and South Sudan.