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01-11-2025
KHARTOUM: The leader of Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has declared an investigation into what he called violations committed by his soldiers during the capture of el-Fasher.
The announcement by Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, came after escalating reports of civilian killings following the RSF takeover of the city in the Darfur region on Sunday.
The RSF leader spoke after international outrage about reports of mass killings in el-Fasher, apparently documented by his paramilitary fighters in social media videos.
A spokesman for the paramilitary group has since denied further accusations by medics that the RSF had killed more 400 people at a hospital in the city on Tuesday.
Media has analyzed the footage confirming that they show the RSF soldiers executing a number of unarmed people in the city.
The UN Security Council is holding an emergency session on Sudan, which is in its third year of civil war between the army and the paramilitary fighters.
British Foreign Office Minister Stephen Doughty said the UK had called the meeting as the “scale of suffering is unconscionable, often based on ethnicity, women and girls facing sexual and gender-based violence, and there is evidence mounting of defenceless civilians being executed and tortured”.
He was responding to an urgent question tabled in Parliament by Labour MP and former development minister Anneliese Dodds, who said the hospital attack “surely must be a turning point in this war and the international community’s focus on it”.
The RSF has also denied widespread allegations that the killings in el-Fasher are ethnically motivated and follow a pattern of the Arab paramilitaries targeting non-Arab populations.
Hemedti said he was sorry for the disaster that had befallen the people of el-Fasher and admitted there had been violations by his forces, which would be investigated by a committee that has now arrived in the city.
However, observers say similar promises made in the past, in response to accusations of a massacre in the Darfuri city of el-Geneina in 2023, and alleged atrocities during the group’s control of the central state of Gezira were not fulfilled.
The UN World Health Organization (WHO) has said it is appalled and deeply shocked by reports that more than 460 civilians, including patients and their companions, were shot dead, at the last partially functioning hospital in el-Fasher.
Analysts from the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab say satellite images that appear to show groups of bodies on the hospital grounds corroborate the accounts but an RSF spokesman insisted that civilians had fled and no hospitals were operational when the paramilitary group seized the city last weekend.
Mohamad Faisal, a spokesperson for the Sudan Doctors Network based in the UK, says their teams on the ground had confirmed the attack on el-Fasher’s Saudi Hospital as seen in social media footage.
“What we have seen is actually absolutely horrific,” he told media.
“The RSF soldiers went into the wards killing inpatients as well as going to the outpatient areas and killing the people who are waiting to be seen in the clinics – so many people.”
Dr Faisal said it had been a terrible three days for his colleagues, some of whom had managed to escape, making the dangerous journey to the town of Tawila, about 60km (37 miles) west of el-Fasher.
Others were still in el-Fasher, where an estimated 250,000 people, many from non-Arab communities, have been trapped during the RSF’s 18-month siege of the city.
From statistics the Sudan Doctors Network had pulled together, he put the figure of those killed at the hospital at 450. (Int’l News Desk)
