NEW YORK: The International Criminal Court has opened a new probe into alleged war crimes in Sudan, its chief prosecutor said Thursday, expressing major concern over escalating violence.
Karim Khan made the announcement in a report to the UN Security Council, after three months of war between feuding generals have plunged the northeast African country back into chaos.
The ICC has been investigating crimes in Sudan’s Darfur region since 2005 after a referral by the UN Security Council, and the Hague-based court has charged former leader Omar Al-Bashir with offenses including genocide.
Allegations of atrocities have mounted during the recent fighting, with the top UN official in Sudan calling for the warring sides to face accountability.
Around 3,000 people have been killed and three million displaced since violence erupted between Sudan army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group.
The pair were key figures in a 2021 military coup that derailed the country’s transition to civilian rule, following the ousting and detention of Bashir in 2019.
The UN has warned of possible new massacres in Darfur, saying Thursday that the bodies of at least 87 people allegedly killed last month by the RSF and their allies had been buried in a mass grave in Darfur.
“The simple truth is that we are... in peril of allowing history to repeat itself — the same miserable history,” Khan told the UNSC.
“If this oft repeated phrase of ‘never again’ is to mean anything, it must mean something here and now to the people of Darfur that has lived with this uncertainty and pain and the scars of conflict for almost two decades,” Khan said as he announced the new probe.
He said there have been a “wide range of communications” about alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity since fighting broke out in April, while the risk of further offenses was “deepened by the clear and long-standing disregard demonstrated by relevant actors, including the government of Sudan, for their obligations.”
Alleged sexual and gender-based crimes were a focus of the new investigation, Khan said.
The US State Department welcomed the new probe. “Let this be a message to all who commit atrocities, in Sudan and elsewhere, that such crimes are an affront to humanity,” spokesman Matthew Miller said in a statement.
Even before the recent fighting broke out, Khan said in the report, there was a deterioration of Sudan’s cooperation with UN investigators.
Sudan’s UN ambassador denied this. “The government of Sudan has constantly cooperated with the ICC,” ambassador Al-Harith Idriss Al-Harith Mohamed said.
The lack of justice for crimes in Darfur in the early 2000s, when Bashir set his Janjaweed militia upon non-Arab minorities, had “sown the seeds for this latest cycle of violence and suffering,” he added.
Bashir was charged with genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity including murder, rape and torture and the court has been demanding his extradition to The Hague ever since, without success.
After Bashir was toppled in 2019, Khartoum announced it would hand him over to the court for prosecution, but this never happened.
Even before the recent fighting there was a “further deterioration in cooperation from Sudanese authorities,” Khan said.
Bashir, 79, as well as Ahmad Harun and Abdel Raheem Hussein, two leading figures in the former dictator’s government who are also wanted by the ICC, are still at large.
So far the only suspect to face trial for violence committed in Sudan is senior Janjaweed militia leader Ali Muhammad Ali Abd Al-Rahman, also known by the nom de guerre Ali Kushayb.
Rahman’s defense lawyers are expected to open their case next month, and Khan said the latest Sudan fighting “cannot be permitted to jeopardize” the trial.
The United Nations says 300,000 people were killed and 2.5 million people displaced in the 2003-4 Darfur conflict.
A summit of leaders from Sudan’s neighbors met in Cairo on Thursday, urging an end to the fighting, but gunbattles, explosions and the roar of fighter jets again shook the capital Khartoum, residents told AFP.
International Criminal Court opens new probe into Sudan violence
https://arab.news/mp6we
International Criminal Court opens new probe into Sudan violence
- The ICC has been investigating crimes in Sudan’s Darfur region since 2005 after a referral by the UN Security Council
- The UN has warned of possible new massacres in Darfur
Baghdad says it will prosecute Daesh militants being moved from Syria to Iraq
- The US military started the transfer process on Friday with the first Daesh prisoners moved from Syria to Iraq
BAGHDAD: Baghdad will prosecute and try militants from the Daesh group who are being transferred from prisons and detention camps in neighboring Syria to Iraq under a US-brokered deal, Iraq said Sunday.
The announcement from Iraq’s highest judicial body came after a meeting of top security and political officials who discussed the ongoing transfer of some 9,000 IS detainees who have been held in Syria since the militant group’s collapse there in 2019.
The need to move them came after Syria’s nascent government forces last month routed Syrian Kurdish-led fighters — once top US allies in the fight against Daesh — from areas of northeastern Syria they had controlled for years and where they had been guarding camps holding Daesh prisoners.
Syrian troops seized the sprawling Al-Hol camp — housing thousands, mostly families of Daesh militants — from the Kurdish-led force, which withdrew as part of a ceasefire. Troops last Monday also took control of a prison in the northeastern town of Shaddadeh, from where some Daesh detainees had escaped during the fighting. Syrian state media later reported that many were recaptured.
Now, the clashes between the Syrian military and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, sparked fears of Daesh activating its sleeper cells in those areas and of Daesh detainees escaping. The Syrian government under its initial agreement with the Kurds said it would take responsibility of the Daesh prisoners.
Baghdad has been particularly worried that escaped Daesh detainees would regroup and threaten Iraq’s security and its side of the vast Syria-Iraq border.
Once in Iraq, Daesh prisoners accused of terrorism will be investigated by security forces and tried in domestic courts, Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council said.
The US military started the transfer process on Friday with the first Daesh prisoners moved from Syria to Iraq. On Sunday, another 125 Daesh prisoners were transferred, according to two Iraqi security officials who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.
So far, 275 prisoners have made it to Iraq, a process that officials say has been slow as the US military has been transporting them by air.
Both Damascus and Washington have welcomed Baghdad’s offer to have the prisoners transferred to Iraq.
Iraq’s parliament will meet later on Sunday to discuss the ongoing developments in Syria, where its government forces are pushing to boost their presence along the border.
The fighting between the Syrian government and the SDF has mostly halted with a ceasefire that was recently extended. According to Syria’s Defense Ministry, the truce was extended to support the ongoing transfer operation by US forces.
The Daesh group was defeated in Iraq in 2017, and in Syria two years later, but Daesh sleeper cells still carry out deadly attacks in both countries. As a key US ally in the region, the SDF played a major role in defeating Daesh.
During the battles against Daesh, thousands of extremists and tens of thousands of women and children linked to them were taken and held in prisons and at the Al-Hol camp. The sprawling Al-Hol camp hosts thousands of women and children.
Last year, US troops and their partner SDF fighters detained more than 300 Daesh militants in Syria and killed over 20. An ambush in December by Daesh militants killed two US soldiers and one American civilian interpreter in Syria.
