Drugs, blood and terror: Inside a paramilitary massacre in Sudan

Washington Post

17-07-2025

SALHA, Sudan — The families had pooled their money for the convoy, hoping to escape the battle for the final piece of the Sudanese capital in late April. They had just set off when paramilitary gunmen shot out their tires at a roadblock, survivors said. The men were forced out, they recalled, then the fighters threatened to set the trucks on fire with the women and children inside.
'Everyone was crying and screaming,' said Amal Ismail, 30, holding tightly to her son, a wide-eyed boy of 10. 'We could see our husbands and brothers being beaten outside.'
Soon, the killing began.
At least 31 people were massacred on April 27 in Salha, a neighborhood in the city of Omdurman, across the Nile from the capital, Khartoum, survivors said. Drawing on eight eyewitness accounts and videos, as well as evidence gathered from the scene, The Washington Post has reconstructed the events of that day, documenting a bloody breakdown in discipline among Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary fighters as Sudan's military closed in. Survivors said the men who attacked had often previously been high on drugs, and may have been that day, which they believe contributed to their brutality.
Sudan's civil war erupted in April 2023 after a power struggle between the head of the military and the leader of the RSF. More than 150,000 people have been killed in the conflict and over 12 million forced from their homes. Famine and disease are spreading unchecked.
In the early days of fighting, civilians were rarely the main targets. But as the RSF recruited new fighters, and the military raised militias, mass killings of noncombatants became more common. Atrocities similar to those in Salha have been carried out across the country, but with few journalists still able to operate, many victims' stories remain untold.
The use of drugs by irregular fighters has introduced a dangerous new variable to an already lawless battlefield. In May, reporters visited a makeshift factory recently recaptured by the army where authorities said the RSF had been producing Captagon, a synthetic stimulant that contains amphetamine.
'We knew the RSF in our neighborhood who had been there for two years and they did not bother the community,' said Juma Mohamed Ismail, a lawyer from Salha. But earlier this year, he said, new fighters arrived who had been pushed out of other parts of the city. The new guys, he said, 'took a lot of pills.'
The RSF did not respond to requests for comment.
What happened in Salha reveals how RSF leaders are increasingly failing to assert command and control, leaving civilians to pay the price.
A maze of sandy residential streets and small businesses, Salha was one of the first areas seized by the RSF during the war. It fell largely without a fight, sparing residents the wholesale destruction visited on other parts of the capital. Just over a year ago, the military began retaking Khartoum piece by piece. As its advance accelerated in the spring, roads and markets near Salha shut down.
'There was nothing. No food, no water, no medicine,' said Jalal Siraj, a 50-year-old truck driver who was part of the convoy.
Different RSF fighters, many from neighboring South Sudan, began pouring in.
'The new guys were selling drugs everywhere — in shops, in the market. They would sniff powder, even young boys like 13. And then they would bother the ladies,' said 25-year-old Rihab Ismail, Juma's middle sister.
'I saw them shoot a boy who was just standing at the gate of his house, for no reason,' said Rukiya Kharif, a mother of four.
At the end of May, a police escort took Post reporters to an abandoned, half-constructed apartment building in the neighborhood of Bahri, 15 miles northeast of Salha, on the other side of the Nile. Strewn around the building were packages of white powder marked 'animal feed supplement' and 'manufactured in Syria.' In the last years of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad's rule, that country became a leading producer of Captagon.
Mixers and an industrial pill press had been set up there, and crate-loads of new equipment broken open. Police said the factory could produce 100,000 Captagon pills per hour.
High and drunk at all hours, the RSF recruits in Salha would shoot off their guns at random, Juma said, forcing him to hustle inside with his children. Within their sunbaked walls, they were safe from bullets but not from the heat.
'Too dangerous outside, too hot inside, miserable everywhere,' he said.
Siraj Ali, 53, said his uncle approached the longtime RSF commander in the area and explained their predicament. The commander offered them guards, according to Ali, but his uncle said there wouldn't be enough to protect every household. Juma's eldest sister, Amal, said the families paid the commander $1,200 for permission to leave. Ali's uncle called the military to negotiate crossing the front lines.
The Ismail family gathered just before dawn with their friends and neighbors, between 250 and 300 people in all, survivors said. The women and children were loaded into the depths of two trucks, normally used to transport cattle; the men were on top for protection. Two RSF vehicles escorted them, one in front and one behind.
After only 500 yards, they hit an RSF checkpoint. The men there were behaving erratically, the Ismail sisters said; they seemed to be hopped up on drugs.
Most of their RSF escorts quickly abandoned them, Amal recounted, but two remained. She said one pleaded with his fellow fighters not to set the trucks ablaze, and to release the women and children.
'I am a father and I cannot see this happen,' she remembered him saying.
The men in the convoy were forced to strip off their shirts, the women said, then beaten. A video geolocated by The Post to the scene of the roadblock shows a group of terrified men surrounded by jeering fighters.
'Don't beat them. Kill them. Don't compromise. Kill, kill!' say the armed men in the video.
The sisters identified a man in blue shorts as their brother Mohamed, a 28-year-old shopkeeper. They said he was killed that day along with their younger brother, 20-year-old Adam.
The fighters separated the men and women and took them to different buildings, survivors recalled. The sisters said the women were searched for cash, and told that if they hid it they would be killed. Their phones were inspected for online bank accounts; those without battery power were charged so the accounts could be emptied.
Two of Siraj's sisters were beaten to death, witnesses later told him. He said he was marched away to an RSF prison and never found their bodies.
Ali was taken with the men to another building nearby, he said, and held with six others. Their captors shot dead one of the men, Yusuf Hassan, for no reason, Ali said. In the next room over, two survivors said, an RSF militiaman laughed as he threw a grenade in their direction, but it did not explode.
The fighters demanded to know who had organized the convoy. When they identified Ali, the RSF fighters forced him outside, he said, screaming that the group was smuggling weapons for the army. Ali said he frantically assured the gunmen that the families had no ties to the military, that they were only trying to escape. He showed them the document from the RSF commander guaranteeing their safe passage.
The fighters just laughed and beat him, Ali said, shooting around his feet. Soon, seven RSF military police arrived on the scene: 'They tried to stop it but the others were out of control,' Ali said.
The police dragged Ali to a makeshift prison a couple hundred yards away. The rest of the captives were left to their fate.
In a bare room behind a girls' high school, Ali said he watched through a hole in the door as a couple dozen men from the convoy were marched past the gate. Then they passed out of sight.
'Suddenly, I heard a lot of shooting, at least 15 guns altogether,' Ali said. 'The guards came back inside and said, 'We have just killed your people.''
Amal's 10-year-old son described seeing a large pile of bodies near the school. The RSF told him they had been killed by a drone strike, he said. A video verified by The Post shows the men being marched along the street, taunted and beaten by RSF fighters. A second video shows at least 19 lifeless bodies, including some of the same men, jumbled on top of each other.
'It's the 27th of April 2025. History will never forget us doing this work,' one of the RSF fighters can be heard saying in the video.
In another video, a bearded man in uniform films himself in front of the bodies. 'I am the one who gave permission to kill these people,' he says proudly. 'Anyone who has any problem, let him come to me.'
The men 'had to be on drugs,' Siraj said. 'Sudanese people do not just kill for nothing.'
At least 31 people died that day, locals said. Among them: A computer graduate who studied in India. A recently married mechanic. A father and his 4-year-old son.
The true toll was probably higher. Witnesses said other captives were taken away and many have not been seen again. Salha has no phone network. The survivors have scattered. No one knows how many are missing, or how to trace them.
As news of the massacre trickled out, the RSF moved quickly into damage-control mode. The group has sought to portray itself as a defender of human rights and democracy fighting a repressive military regime.
'The soldiers in the video are not from the RSF at all,' senior RSF adviser Elbasha Tbaeq said in a message posted to X on the night of the killings. The post was later taken down.
The commander who had filmed himself in front of the bodies posted a nearly seven-minute video to TikTok the next day, again claiming responsibility. 'My name is Jar El Nabi Abdullah,' he says in the video, reclining in an armchair with a turban and sunglasses. 'The people who said this killing was not RSF — I'm from the RSF. My [badge] number is 50139136.'
He said the convoy had been concealing small arms, but provided no evidence. He accused some of the families of being related to members of the Al-Bara' ibn Malik Battalion, a military-affiliated militia whose members have filmed themselves sawing the heads off captives and mutilating bodies.
'It is allowed for you to behead and it's not allowed for me to kill?' he asked in the video.
Eight of the surviving adults from the convoy, as well and friends and relatives of the dead and missing, said they had no ties to the militia. They added that their only contact with the military had come when they were trying to organize their movement across the front lines.
Ali was sure he would be killed. But after he spent hours of interrogation in the RSF prison, his brother scraped together $800 and bought his freedom, he said.
Weeks later, he took reporters back to the roadblock. The neighborhood had been retaken by the military just days before. The corpses of RSF fighters still lay in the streets.
The things families had taken with them were scattered about. There were clothes and papers in the sand. Dental records, schoolbooks, driving licenses and family photographs were jumbled up with bullet casings. And there were two freshly dug, unmarked graves — one for an adult and one for a child.
Ali said 16 members of his family were killed that day. He bent down to pick up a small green shirt, the wind whipping his long white djellaba. 'This belongs to my cousin's son Ahmed,' he said. 'He was 7 years old.'
He pressed the shirt to his chest. 'Praise God, he survived.'
Jonathan Baran in San Francisco contributed to this report.