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LONDON: His name — or, at least, his nom de guerre — is Issa Abu Lulu.

Reportedly a senior officer in the Rapid Support Forces, now locked in a vicious civil war with the Sudanese Armed Forces, Abu Lulu has been named the “star” of several distressing videos circulating on social media over the past week.

In at least two clips, filmed after the RSF’s recent takeover of the city of El-Fasher in western Sudan, he appears to shoot unarmed prisoners at point-blank range.

It is not the first time Abu Lulu has allowed himself to be filmed attacking helpless captives.

On Aug. 18, during an earlier RSF assault on El-Fasher, footage surfaced of him interrogating a civilian.

A transcript published by Sudans Post, which describes itself as “an independent, young, grassroots news media organization,” identified Abu Lulu as Brig. Gen. Al-Fatih Abdallah Idris, an RSF officer.

In the video, Abu Lulu reportedly asks the man, who says he is a restaurant owner, to reveal the whereabouts of the leader of an enemy infantry division.

In a translation by Sudans Post, Abu Lulu warns him to “talk straight,” adding: “I swear to God I don’t talk much, and I don’t spare people. Since God established the Rapid Support (Forces), I have never spared anyone — not a prisoner, not anyone.”

The terrified man insists he knows nothing.

When asked about his tribal background, he replies that he is Maba — a non-Arab Sunni Muslim group also known as the Borgo. Without hesitation, Abu Lulu draws his handgun and seems to shoot him dead.

When this footage emerged in August, the RSF said it would investigate, promising that “if it is proven that the perpetrator is indeed a member of our ranks, he will be held accountable without delay.”

There is no evidence that such an investigation ever materialized. Abu Lulu was not held accountable — and in recent days, he has again appeared on camera reveling in the murder of unarmed captives.

His case, while egregious, is far from unique.

On Oct. 29, the World Health Organization condemned the killing of at least 460 patients and relatives at the Saudi Maternity Hospital in El-Fasher, reportedly by RSF fighters, along with the abduction of six health workers — four doctors, a nurse and a pharmacist.

Brazen actions attributed to Abu Lulu underscore how far the RSF has fallen from any semblance of military discipline.

Since gaining independence in 1956 after nearly six decades of joint Anglo-Egyptian rule, Sudan has been plagued by coups and bloodshed as competing factions vie for power.

At times, the sheer scale of suffering has momentarily pierced global indifference toward the country — home to more than 50 million people, bordered by seven nations and the Red Sea to the east.

One such moment came during the Darfur conflict, when government-backed forces targeted non-Arab populations in the western region.

That war, which erupted in 2003 and lingered for 16 years, killed as many as 300,000 people through violence and starvation.

It also triggered an investigation by the International Criminal Court, which issued arrest warrants for Omar Bashir, the ousted Sudan president, and several others on charges of war crimes.

Bashir was ousted by the Sudanese Armed Forces in 2019 and later jailed on corruption charges. He is believed to be in a hospital in northern Sudan, and the government has refused ICC requests to extradite him.

The architects of Darfur’s atrocities are not aligned with the RSF. The military remains dominated by figures from Bashir’s former regime.

However, only one ICC suspect has ever faced justice.

In June 2020, Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman, commonly known as Ali Kushayb, surrendered in the Central African Republic. He was accused of 31 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur.

Transferred to The Hague, he was convicted on 27 counts in October. A sentencing date has yet to be set.

Abd-Al-Rahman’s conviction revived scrutiny of the RSF’s origins.

When the ICC warrants were first issued, Abd-Al-Rahman was a leader of the Janjaweed — the Arab militias that waged a campaign of rape, murder, looting and village destruction in Darfur.

By 2013, those militias were reorganized and rebranded by the Bashir government as the RSF.

“The RSF has been referred to as an offshoot, an evolution, or rebranding of the Janjaweed militias that were operating in the 2000s in Darfur,” said Michael Jones, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London.

“It features many of the same constituent parts, although RSF recruitment has expanded beyond the conventional confines of the Janjaweed,” Jones told Arab News. “It has much more sophisticated capabilities and far greater military, political and financial resources than previous militia groups.”

Ironically, the force that Bashir once used as a tool of repression in Darfur has now turned against his former army.

In 2013, even under nominal government oversight, the RSF wasted no time demonstrating its taste for humanitarian crimes.

In September 2015, Human Rights Watch detailed RSF abuses in a report titled “Men With No Mercy.” Based on interviews with 151 survivors who had fled to Chad and South Sudan, the organization accused the RSF and other Sudanese forces of “serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law” in Darfur.

The report cited “a wide range of horrific abuses, including the forced displacement of entire communities; the destruction of wells, food stores and other infrastructure necessary for sustaining life in a harsh desert environment; and the plunder of the collective wealth of families, such as livestock.

“Among the most egregious abuses against civilians were torture, extrajudicial killings and mass rapes,” it added.

The current conflict erupted in April 2023, when the RSF resisted efforts to integrate into the Sudanese Armed Forces.

The clash became a personal power struggle between two former allies — Gen. Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, head of the army and Sudan’s de facto leader, and Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, widely known as Hemedti, who commands the RSF.

“The RSF leadership wanted to ensure the paramilitary group’s survival, and by extension their own financial and commercial interests,” Jones said. “So, they pushed back against the proposed integration of the RSF into a single national military force, which would have risked diluting Hemedti’s political clout.”

As the RSF fought to maintain its military might and form a state within a state, it broadened its recruitment and allegiance networks.

“It has increasingly developed into a diverse coalition of different, often highly localized stakeholders,” Jones said.  

“There is a core leadership either drawn from the Dagalo family or its kinship networks, but the group is increasingly reliant on provincial elites and power brokers for mobilizing new recruits,” he added.

“As a result, these local militiamen have been described as operating as a franchise, with close ties to mid-level commanders who do not necessarily align with every decision coming down from the RSF leadership.”

“This is not to say that RSF policies and directives aren’t conditioning what’s happening on the ground,” Jones said.

“There’s a lot of reporting to suggest that there is a deliberate approach by the RSF to engage in ethnic cleansing, repeating patterns evident in Sudan’s past conflicts,” he explained. “But there are also those within its coalition that are pursuing their own agendas and interests.”

The RSF is hardly alone in committing atrocities.

A 2024 UN fact-finding mission found that both the RSF and the Sudanese military had attacked civilians and civilian infrastructure through airstrikes and artillery in populated areas, notably Khartoum and Darfur.

Both sides were also accused of killing and maiming children, conducting arbitrary arrests, and engaging in torture — all “amounting to war crimes.”

With the RSF’s capture of El-Fasher in late October, its leaders have hinted at forming a rival government. Yet Sudan today appears too fractured for either side to establish coherent control, according to Jones.

“The difficulty is that the Sudanese state and Sudanese society more broadly has become steadily more fractured and militarized over time,” he said.

“It is a congested political landscape of different armed groups tussling over control at a local and regional level, leaving any prospect of coherent governance by the RSF or army unlikely in the short to medium term.”

For ordinary Sudanese, the outlook is grim.

“Sudan is a humanitarian catastrophe on so many different levels,” said Jones. “We’re seeing a pattern of violence and atrocity that Sudanese civilians are bearing the brunt of, and which is unlikely to change due in part to the proliferation of armed groups within Sudan.

“Alongside diminishing aid budgets, there are well-documented problems around aid capture, extortion, lack of access, politicization of humanitarian resources, and so on,” he added. “All of that has massive knock-on effects for the Sudanese population, with the collapse of the domestic food and logistical systems across large tracts of Sudan.”

Despite rhetoric about accountability, Jones said there is little concrete evidence that the RSF or other factions in Sudan are pursuing genuine efforts to address war crimes.

“There is a lot of rhetoric around accountability, including by the RSF itself, claiming it will deploy police forces and special investigation committees and field courts to regulate the behavior of its rank and file,” Jones said. “That’s obviously translated into very little.”

“Additionally, you have a raft of middlemen who are converting RSF policy into violent practice, making it very difficult to identify and hold those figures accountable for their actions,” he added.

Moreover, the pursuit of justice often clashes with efforts to broker peace.

There is also “the ongoing tension between peace-making, ceasefires, and atrocity prevention,” Jones said.

“If you are proposing to engage the RSF as part of an effort to resolve or mitigate conflict, how far can you go, now or later, to prosecute those same stakeholders? How far does that undermine your ability to mitigate the conflict or incentivize buy-in?”

And because atrocities are widespread, few actors have clean hands.

“The RSF is not the only force accused of perpetrating war crimes,” Jones said. “While the scale and logic of RSF crimes are qualitatively distinct, reports have documented starvation strategies, indiscriminate shelling and bombing of civilian areas, and extrajudicial violence in territory held by the army and so on.

“A sizeable proportion of the stakeholders across Sudan’s warring coalitions are themselves are either complicit in or were previously involved in similar crimes. So, there is unlikely to be an appetite on the part of these armed groups to impose real accountability.”
 

NEW YORK: The UN Security Council on Thursday expressed grave concern over what it described as a horrifying assault by Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces on the besieged city of El-Fasher, North Darfur, warning that atrocities against civilians risk spiraling into large-scale, ethnically motivated killings.

In a statement adopted by consensus, council members condemned the RSF attack and its “devastating impact on the civilian population,” recalling Resolution 2736 from 2024 which demands that the RSF lift its siege of the city and halt hostilities.

The council urged all sides to “protect civilians and abide by their obligations under international humanitarian law,” while stressing the need for “safe passage for those trying to flee the city.”

The statement called on all parties to “allow and facilitate safe and unhindered humanitarian access,” and reaffirmed the council’s opposition to any “parallel governing authority” in areas under RSF control. It also urged states to refrain from “external interference which seeks to foment conflict and instability.”

The Security Council’s message came as top UN officials described a catastrophic situation on the ground.

UN Humanitarian Chief Tom Fletcher told the council that after more than a year of siege, El-Fasher has “descended into an even darker hell.”

“Can anyone here say we did not know this was coming?” Fletcher asked, describing reports of mass executions, rapes, and mutilations by RSF fighters.

“We cannot hear the screams, but as we sit here today, the horror is continuing.”

He cited reports that nearly 500 people, including patients and their companions, were killed this week at the Saudi Maternity Hospital in the city, calling it “yet another example of the depravity with which this war has been fought.”

“Those who want to leave El-Fasher must be able to do so safely. Those who remain must be protected,” Fletcher said.

“There must be accountability for those carrying out the killing and the sexual violence. For those giving the orders. And those providing the weapons should consider their responsibility.”

He said the UN had been repeatedly blocked by the RSF from delivering food and medicine, even as “tens of thousands of terrified, starving civilians” fled on foot toward Tawila, itself overwhelmed with displaced people.

“This is not just a crisis of violence — it is a crisis of hunger,” he said.

“Famine is confirmed, and severe food insecurity is spreading. Blood on the sand. And Mr. President, blood on the hands.”

Fletcher condemned the expulsion of World Food Programme officials by Sudanese authorities, and warned that “humanitarians simply asking that we be allowed to do our jobs and save lives is not working.”

Assistant Secretary-General Martha Ama Akyaa Pobee told the council that El-Fasher had fallen to the RSF after more than 500 days under siege, with only “small pockets of resistance” remaining.

“The situation is simply horrifying,” Pobee said. “In the past week, the UN Human Rights Office has documented widespread and serious violations, including mass killings and summary executions during house-to-house searches and as civilians tried to flee.”

She said communications with the city had been severed, making it difficult to assess the full scale of casualties. “Despite commitments to protect civilians, the reality is that no one is safe in El-Fasher. There is no safe passage for civilians to leave the city.”

Pobee also cited reports of atrocities in North Kordofan, including the killing of 50 civilians and five Red Crescent volunteers in Bara after the RSF captured the town. “These acts are often ethnically motivated reprisals,” she said.

The UN political chief warned that the conflict’s territorial scope is widening, with drone strikes and fighting spreading across Kordofan, Blue Nile, Sennar, and Khartoum. “The risk of mass atrocities remains alarmingly high,” she said.

Pobee reiterated the secretary-general’s call for an immediate ceasefire and cautioned against foreign meddling.

“External support is enabling the conflict. Weapons and fighters continue to flow into Sudan,” she said, urging states with influence over the warring parties to press for de-escalation.

Fletcher ended his address with a stark warning about the world’s moral failure to stop atrocities reminiscent of Darfur’s darkest days.

“What is unfolding in El-Fasher recalls the horrors Darfur was subjected to 20 years ago,” he said. “But somehow today we are seeing a very different global reaction — one of indifference, resignation, a shrugging of shoulders.”

He addressed the council: “Where is our diplomacy? Where are our values? Where is our conscience?

“The world has failed an entire generation of Sudan’s children,” Fletcher said. “If this council does not act now, it will own that failure.”