The government-aligned Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have recaptured two territories in the North Kordofan state from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), as the paramilitary group continues burning and burying bodies in Darfur’s el-Fasher to hide evidence of mass killings.
Footage circulating online this week showed army soldiers holding assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades celebrating their takeovers of Kazqil and Um Dam Haj Ahmed in North Kordofan, the state where intense fighting is expected to rage over the coming weeks.
Kazqil, which had fallen to the RSF in late October, is located south of el-Obeid, the strategic capital city of the state in central Sudan, which the paramilitary group is trying to capture from the army.
The fighting between the two rival generals leading the army and the paramilitary group, which started in April 2023, has increasingly turned east over the past weeks as the RSF solidifies control over the western parts of the war-torn country, now in its third year of a brutal civil war.
The fighting, fuelled by arms supplies from the region, has created what the United Nations has called the largest displacement crisis in the world. More than 12 million people have been forced from their homes, and tens of thousands have been killed and injured. The UN has also confirmed starvation in parts of the country.
The RSF said last week it accepted a ceasefire proposal put forward by the United States and other mediators, with the announcement coming after an international outcry over atrocities committed by the paramilitary group in el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state in western Sudan.
But the army has refused to agree to a ceasefire under the current battle lines, and both sides have continued to amass troops and equipment in the central parts of the country to engage in more battles.
The RSF launched an offensive against the Kordofan region at the same time as it took el-Fasher late last month, seizing the town of Bara in North Kordofan state as a crucial link between Darfur and central Sudan. The army had recaptured the town just two months earlier.
Satellite images reveal mass graves
More than two and a half weeks after fully capturing el-Fasher from the army, the RSF has continued to dispose of bodies in large numbers.
An analysis of satellite imagery released by Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL) on Friday exposed four new locations where paramilitary fighters are disposing of bodies in and around el-Fasher.
Activities consistent with body disposal are visible at the University of Alfashir, a structure on the edge of Abu Shouk camp for internally displaced people, a neighbourhood near al-Hikma Mosque, and at Saudi Hospital, where RSF forces massacred hundreds.
The HRL could not conclude how many people the RSF had killed or how quickly, but it said the observations are alarming, given the fact that the whereabouts of many civilian residents remain unknown.
Nathaniel Raymond, the lead researcher of that report, said an estimated 150,000 civilians are unaccounted for, and daily monitoring of city streets shows no activity in markets or water points, but only RSF patrols and many bodies.
“We can see them charred. So the question is, where are the people and where are the bodies coming from?” he told Al Jazeera.
Raymond said the evidence also includes numerous videos released by the RSF fighters themselves, who are “the most prodigious producers of evidence about their own crimes”.
