Emergency Lawyers: Sudan army executing more people in Khartoum

Members of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) are targeting and liquidating civilians in eastern Khartoum Bahri (Khartoum North), the Sudanese Emergency Lawyers Group reported yesterday. The SAF continued its advance in the past days, in North Kordofan and in Khartoum.

Emergency Lawyers accused members of the SAF of being behind summary executions, arbitrary detentions, and enforced disappearances in the neighbourhoods of the large Sharg El Nil locality, in a statement on its Facebook page yesterday.

Recently, the SAF retook control of most of Khartoum North (Khartoum Bahri), including large parts in Sharg El Nil (East Nile).

The targeting is mainly based on lists with names of people posted on social media. The posts contain “unsubstantiated charges related to cooperation with the Rapid Support Forces [RSF],” the Emergency Lawyers Group explained. “These provocative calls, based on unreliable suspicions, which target innocent people, have led to an escalation of violence and threatens the stability of society and human rights.”

Apart from constituting a flagrant violation of international humanitarian and human rights laws, the arbitrarily detentions, extrajudicial liquidations, and enforced disappearances of defenceless civilians create an environment of fear and terror among civilians, the lawyers state. “The absence of any effective legal measures opens the way for those responsible for these violations to escape punishment.”

The group calls for holding accountable the instigators of violence who published these lists and called for the liquidation of certain people. “Firm legal measures need to be taken to prosecute the instigators and punish those who carried out these crimes.”

Emergency Lawyers called on the international community “to conduct an immediate and independent investigation into these violations and to ensure a fair trial for those responsible for these crimes, including those who incited the violence”.

Summary executions and arbitrary detentions of people, in particular young volunteers helping out the needy, suspected of ‘cooperating with the enemy’ have been reported since the start of the war nearly two years ago. Both the SAF (Military Intelligence) and RSF have been carrying out these illegal actions, often on an ethnic basis.

In October last year, after the SAF and the El Baraa bin Malik militia brigade, affiliated with the Islamic Movement and fighting alongside the army, entered Halfaya in Khartoum North from Omdurman, more than 70 young people volunteering in takaya (soup kitchens) in the neighbourhood were accused of cooperating with the RSF and shot dead.

Last month, after the army had retaken Wad Madani, the capital of El Gezira, alarming footage circulated on social media, showing army soldiers and allied forces carrying out extrajudicial killings and torturing people in areas previously controlled by the RSF.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk Türk earlier this month stated he was deeply alarmed by reports of extrajudicial killings of people –many originally from Darfur or Kordofan– in seven separate incidents in Khartoum North (Bahri), and reiterated his call for “an immediate end to such attacks”. UN Secretary-General António Guterres also strongly condemned the summary executions of civilians in Khartoum Bahri, allegedly by fighters and militia allied to the SAF.

SAF advances

Since March last year, when the SAF managed to take control of the National Radio and Television Corporation and other parts of old Omdurman, the army has been steadily regaining territory in central Sudan.

After victories in Sennar in October, and El Gezira in January, the army advanced to Khartoum, from the southern, western and northern directions. It retook large parts of ‘ghost town’ Khartoum North in the end of last month.

The SAF continued its advance in the past days. On Monday, SAF spokesman Brig Gen Nabil Abdallah reported the army’s control of El Rahad in southern North Kordofan after seizing the El Sameh area west of Um Rawaba on Sunday.

With its control of El Rahad, the army forces have covered half the distance on their way to El Obeid, the capital of North Korofan, which is about 80 kilometers away. Since the outbreak of the war in April 2023, the RSF have been besieging El Obeid from all directions.

The RSF claimed control over the 53rd Infantry Brigade in Habila in South Kordofan after the army took control of the area on Sunday morning and reported that the RSF had withdrawn towards the town of El Debibad.

In Khartoum, the army yesterday announced taking control of the Kober Bridge, connecting Khartoum with Khartoum North/Bahri, and large parts of El Sajana and El Hilla El Jadeeda in southeastern Khartoum. SAF troops were advancing towards the Ed Deim neighbourhoods.

On Sunday, the armed forces seized the El Maigoma neighbourhood and a number of areas in El Haj Yousef in Sharg El Nil.