PORT SUDAN: Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces group has undertaken systematic mass killing and body disposal in the overrun Darfur city of El-Fasher, a new report has found.
Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL), which has used satellite imagery to monitor atrocities since the RSF’s war with the army began, said on Tuesday the group “destroyed and concealed evidence of its widespread mass killings” in the North Darfur state capital.
The RSF’s violent takeover of the army’s last holdout position in the Darfur region in October led to international outrage over reports of summary executions, systematic rape and mass detention.
The HRL said that in the aftermath of the takeover, it had identified 150 clusters of objects consistent with human remains.
Dozens were consistent with reports of execution-style killings, and dozens more with reports of the RSF killing civilians as they fled.
Within a month, nearly 60 of those clusters were no longer visible, while eight earth disturbances appeared near the sites of mass killing, the HRL said.
It said the disturbances were not consistent with civilian burial practices.
“Largescale and systematic mass killing and body disposal has occurred,” the report determined, estimating the death toll in the city to be in the tens of thousands.
Aid groups and the UN have repeatedly demanded safe access to El-Fasher, where communications remain cut and an estimated tens of thousands of survivors are trapped, many detained by the RSF.
There is no confirmed death toll from the Sudan war which began in April 2023, with estimates at more than 150,000.
Sudan’s de facto leader General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan leads the army while the RSF is headed by his former deputy, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.
The fighting has also displaced millions of people, and created the world’s largest hunger and displacement crises.
Efforts to end the war have repeatedly faltered.