On 16 March, Red Crescent volunteers pulled 15 bodies from the bottom of a well in a recently recaptured area of East Nile district in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum. Speaking to Reuters about the incident, Hisham Zain al-Abdin, the director of forensic medicine for Khartoum state, said that most of the 15 victims had been shot in the head, while the injuries on some suggest ‘they were thrown in the well alive.’ The director said bodies continue to be found in areas that the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) recaptured from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group.
Reuters reported that Hussein al-Faki, one of the residents who reported the bodies to authorities, said local people had tried to bury the bodies, but armed men controlling the area during the RSF occupation ‘warned us not to go near them.’
The UN notes that both sides in the war—the SAF and the RSF—have committed atrocities amounting to war crimes since 2018. In January, the US placed sanctions on leaders of both warring parties.
However, in this foreign-backed proxy war that kicked off on 15 April 2023, the United Arab Emirates-bankrolled RSF is responsible for most of the atrocities and are accused of g*nocide. Meaningful accountability measures against the UAE remain amiss.
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s Sudan Research Group estimates the proxy war had k*lled at least 60,000 people in its first 14 months in just Khartoum alone. Plus, in May 2024, US envoy Tom Perriello estimated 150,000 deaths.
Today, the proxy war has displaced over 14 million people and left over half the country’s people—30.4 million—in dire need of aid. Not only is Sudan suffering the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world, it is also the ‘largest as well as the fastest growing displacement crisis globally,’ according to the UN, with a total displaced population that is ‘greater than the entire population of Switzerland.’
Sources
https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/02/1160161
https://x.com/geoffreyyork/status/1786073142475075756