'You made a mistake trying to leave': Crossing enemy lines in the heart of Sudan

Middle East Eye

4 days ago

Amal Ismail had heard enough. For two days she had been begging the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) commander to tell her anything about her two brothers, brother-in-law and cousin.
They were last seen dragged from a lorry carrying Amal's family and around 200 other members of the Jame'at tribe on a road heading from al-Salha, an area on the outskirts of Omdurman, to the centre of the Sudanese city.
The commander told her some people from the lorry had been killed. He ordered her to be patient. The situation was tense, he snapped, and her relatives' fate would be revealed eventually.
"You made a mistake trying to leave al-Salha. Why not tell us if you had a problem living here," Amal recalls him saying.
So she left. At home she retrieved a phone she had hidden and headed to one of the only spots that had a signal.
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She was deluged with messages: videos fighters had posted on social media, showing them crowing triumphantly in front of men stripped to their waist, and various texts from friends asking if Amal was alive and well.
In one video, fighters open fire on a group of detainees sat helpless on the ground. "No one will be spared," one says.
Another shows piles of bodies, among which Amal saw a man dumped under a car tyre. It was her brother Mohammed, lifeless. Her brother-in-law, al-Khair Ibrahim, can be seen being lashed.
Eventually it became clear at least 31 people had been killed by the RSF.
"Al-Khair was brave. Even in the video you can see him looking into the eyes of the man beating him," says Rihab Ismail, Ibrahim's wife.
"We will never forgive the RSF for this, we will never forget."
'We were tortured'
Amal and Rihab's ordeal began in late April, when their family and scores of other members of the Jame'at tribe decided to leave al-Salha in a convoy.
The suburb to the west of Khartoum across the White Nile had been under RSF control for two years.
There was no electricity, barely any food and the only water source was a bitter fluid dredged up from a ground well that even the RSF wouldn't touch. As Amal puts it: "Everything was bad."
Most people crammed into the lorry, but a few others drove alongside in cars and other smaller vehicles.
Rihab Ismail (L) and Amal Ismail were separated from their husbands and other men when the convoy they were travelling in was stopped by the RSF (Daniel Hilton/MEE)
To the north was Omdurman, Khartoum's twin city, which had been held by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) for months and had some modicum of habitable life.
But dozens of RSF fighters were in the way of the convoy. Seeing the truck moving towards them, they shot its tyres and forced everyone out.
Five members of the convoy told Middle East Eye they were whipped, shot at and abused. People were divided into groups of half a dozen and brought into small shops lining the road.
"There, we were tortured," says Yusuf Hussein. "They used whatever tools they could find, striking us with whips and small blocks."
Hussein said the fighters were obsessed with the convoy being made up of the Jame'at, claiming the tribe was responsible for killing many of their comrades.
This video shared with MEE shows unarmed civilian men being marched through al-Salha after being forced out of their lorry on the way to Omdurman (Daniel Hilton/MEE)
When Ali Wedaa, another member of the convoy, tried to claim he was from another tribe, they killed him.
"They shot him with two bullets to the heart," Hussein says.
Amal, Rihab and other women were separated from the men.
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Any money, gold or mobile phones found were confiscated. "If they saw you had money on a phone banking app, they made you transfer that to them as well," Rihab says.
After five hours of interrogation and threats, the women were released, and they headed home.
On the way, three fighters intercepted them and tried to force them into a house. Rihab refused and one pressed a knife against her neck. When Amal intervened, they beat her so hard she almost passed out.
Members of the convoy were released in drips and drabs. Ahmed Amin Abdulhakka, a 23-year-old student and barber, was freed after five days of torture.
He had been accused of being a member of a pro-SAF militia, but after paying a ransom of a million Sudanese pounds – about $500 - they let him go.
"In the end it was all about the money," he says.
Al-Salha: Brutalised by war
Mohammed's body was last seen in the video outside the RSF's military intelligence headquarters in al-Salha, a tailor's turned into a ramshackle office.
A large mural of Mohammed Osman Eshag, a famous martyr of Sudan's pro-democracy revolution, stares serenely from the office wall on to the street. Eshag was killed during the 30 June 2019 protest that forced the military to share power with civilians.
Four or five kilometres from Omdurman, al-Salha is a world away from the modernist villas along the city's waterside Nile Street.
Though the market street has been brutalised, its stalls all twisted metal and shredded canopies, somehow the ghosts of happier times make the road crackle with energy.
A few years ago, this was a meeting point for thousands of Sudanese demanding an end to autocracy and persecution before their dreams were crushed by politicking, a military coup and now perhaps Sudan's most devastating civil war.
Though the army and RSF overthrew Sudan's transitional civilian government in 2021 and subsequently shared power, plans to fold the latter into the regular military sparked a war that has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced 13 million others.
Throughout the conflict, the RSF has targeted civilians with killings, lootings and sexual abuse. The United States and several human rights groups have accused it of committing genocide in the western Darfur region.
Its chief backer is the United Arab Emirates, which denies supporting the group militarily but appears to be supplying its fighters nonetheless.
The Sudanese army, which has also been sanctioned by the US for alleged war crimes, seized al-Salha on 19 May and announced it had complete control of Khartoum state for the first time since the war began.
Days later, bodies are still being discovered.
A body can be seen at a morgue in a university used by the RSF (Daniel Hilton/MEE)
Bridgadier al-Rayah Dafallah, an officer in the Sudanese military, says work is still being done to collect slain RSF soldiers from the streets. As for their victims, people are being discovered in unusual places.
"Bodies have even been found buried under the floor in houses," he says.
According to the army, graves "containing the bodies of 465 people who died due to neglect, lack of food, treatment, and medicine" have been discovered, including ones holding up to 27 people.
Bodies poking out of the ground
In a morgue at a university used by the RSF as a base, three tanks hold around 20 corpses. Some are badly decomposed, collapsing together into a dark morass.
Others still have defined features, as well as holes in their sides and slits on the soles of their feet.
SAF says they are RSF victims; the paramilitaries insist they were simply cadavers used by students.
Elsewhere are less contentious burial sites: recently covered large pits stink of rotting flesh.
Outside a police station that fighters turned into a detention centre, an impromptu cemetery has been established in a square. Beds, blankets and mattresses used to drag bodies here lie abandoned, stained with blood.
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The most recent graves were clearly dug in a hurry: a knee juts out of the soil like a rising zombie.
Iptisam Ayyad, a teacher, watched the cemetery expand quickly under RSF rule.
She mourns the al-Salha she knew before the war. "It was such a nice place to live. It was safe," she says.
According to Ayyad, many women in al-Salha talk about being harassed or kidnapped. "The RSF even took the daughters of our neighbours," she says.
In response to public outcry prompted by the videos circulating of the al-Salha massacre, a local RSF officer claimed the detainees were members of al-Bara ibn Malik Brigade, an ultraconservative militia fighting alongside SAF.
Yet the RSF later claimed that it had nothing to do with the footage at all.
Amal, Rihab and scores of other al-Salha residents are in limbo. They suspect the worst, but without a body it's impossible to move on.
"Even today we don't know exactly who was killed," Amal says. "Our father is going to morgues looking for our missing. It's more painful not knowing if they were killed or survived."
Walking past freshly dug graves has become a maddening routine.
"Some people are talking about opening them up to find answers," Rihab says.