In Sudan, Perpetrators of War Crimes Are Rewarded While Civilians Languish

On a warm night in July 2024, soldiers from the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) stormed into Yasser’s home in the eastern city of Kassala. They climbed over the gated walls and barged through the front door carrying batons and Kalashnikov rifles. They told Yasser, who requested pseudonyms for himself and his family out of fear of reprisal, that his 21-year-old daughter Hind was accused of collaborating with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary at war with the SAF, Sudan’s army, since April 2023.

After Hind was whisked away, Yasser visited the detention facility where she was being held. An officer there said a photo of a dead RSF fighter was found on Hind’s phone, along with a caption that read: “Rest in Peace.”

“I asked Hind if she had such a photo on her device and she said no,” Yasser told Truthout over the phone. “But three months later in November, she was sentenced to death. Our entire family was stunned.”

After an appeal, Hind’s sentence was reduced to five years in prison. She remains one of thousands of people jailed for their alleged ties to the RSF. According to victims’ families and human rights groups, most are snatched from their homes or off the streets based on flimsy evidence. They are then subjected to severe mistreatment, torture and denied due process — many are interrogated without a lawyer and prohibited from seeing family.

Those targeted are typically from humble backgrounds and originally from the sprawling western region of Darfur, the RSF’s stronghold. However, many belong to specific communities that the RSF and SAF have traditionally persecuted.

The sweeping detentions contrast sharply with SAF’s recent embrace of RSF defectors. Since April, three high-profile RSF commanders — implicated in mass atrocities — were given vehicles, weapons and amnesty for switching sides. The double standard reinforces perceptions that the RSF and SAF have a vested interest in upholding a climate of impunity as they wage a war on civilians.

“There is no rule of law in Sudan — neither in RSF nor SAF areas,” Mohamed Osman, the Sudan researcher for Human Rights Watch (HRW), told Truthout.

“Legacy of Impunity”

Throughout Sudan’s history, war criminals and tyrants have rarely faced real consequences from national or international courts, helping maintain a cycle of abuses.

The RSF epitomizes this cycle, having emerged from the Arab militias that spearheaded mass atrocities in the vast region of Darfur in 2003. At the time, SAF mobilized these militias to crush an insurgency by non-Arab fighters, who were rebelling against the political and economic marginalization of their communities. Arab and non-Arab are slippery categories in peripheral Sudan as they denote a communal lifestyle more than a rigid ethnicity: The former tend to be nomadic traders or pastoralists while the latter are sedentary farmers. Both are Black and Muslim and have historically intermarried and shared land for centuries.

However, the counterinsurgency exacerbated tensions over resources and land, culminating in campaigns of ethnic cleansing and allegations of genocide. The International Criminal Court (ICC) eventually indicted four senior Sudanese officials on accounts of war crimes or genocide, including then-President Omar al-Bashir. None of them have been surrendered to the court.

By 2013, al-Bashir integrated many of the nomadic Arab militias into the RSF, giving them official titles, weapons and legal cover. A popular uprising sparked by acute austerity and rising bread prices finally culminated in his unseating six years later, leading to the formation of a military-civilian transitional government. Determined to cling to power, SAF and the RSF upended the transition by overthrowing the civilian administration in a coup in October 2021. Less than two years later, they turned on each other, igniting the civil war in April 2023.

Both sides have since committed summary executions, enforced disappearances and blocked or impeded food aid to cities and towns. The RSF has committed additional atrocities, including genocide and systemic sexual violence against women and girls. Still, SAF has absorbed RSF defectors to incentivize others to follow suit.

“What is the message that SAF is trying to send here?” said Osman. “That you can kill whoever you want, but as long as you carry weapons and switch sides, there will be no consequences?”

“What we are seeing today is the legacy of impunity,” said Osman.

Allegations of impunity have been directed not only at the forces wielding the arms but the ones providing them as well. The United Arab Emirates has bought billions of dollars in weapons from the United States and funneled them to the RSF. Attempts by U.S. congressmembers to introduce legislation prohibiting weapons exports to the UAE have not led to a vote.

Double Standard

One of the defectors is Al-Nour Ahmed Adam — better known as Al-Gubba — who spearheaded atrocities in North Darfur’s capital, el-Fasher, during the RSF’s capture of the city in October 2025.

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The Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab, which provides satellite imagery analysis, said blood was visible from space due to the scale of mass killing in el-Fasher and that the RSF burned corpses to conceal their crimes.

In February 2026, a UN fact-finding mission concluded that the RSF committed genocide against non-Arab communities in el-Fasher. Bedour Zakaria, a survivor and human rights monitor from Darfur, said Al-Gubba played a major role in the killing.

“Al-Gubba was responsible for five different brigades during the RSF’s takeover of el-Fasher,” she told Truthout. “This means he is directly responsible for many of the crimes committed there.”

Al-Gubba defected in April, partially out of spite that the RSF did not appoint him top commander of North Darfur after conquering the state. Like so many people, Yasser was appalled when SAF’s chief commander Abdel Fattah al-Burhan embraced Al-Gubba and other defectors.

After hearing that al-Burhan gifted Al-Gubba a vehicle as a gesture of gratitude, he was unable to reconcile how his daughter was still in prison while perpetrators of war crimes and genocide were being rewarded.

“This is all deeply unjust. People who committed documented crimes — killings and massacres — are granted immunity and accepted back into our society without accountability,” Yasser said.

“Meanwhile, my innocent daughter is imprisoned … for an image that she didn’t even have on her phone,” he added.

Truthout sent WhatsApp messages to SAF spokesman General Assim Awad requesting comment on the disparity between the army’s treatment of defected RSF commanders and that of civilians accused of supporting the RSF.

He did not respond by publication.

Revenge and Score Settling

Many of those charged with treason are women who were too poor to flee to SAF areas after the RSF invaded and occupied their cities and towns. Poverty pushed many to work in markets and sell tea and coffee to RSF fighters to survive, especially if their male relatives and partners were disappeared or killed, explained Osman.

When SAF recaptured cities, they rounded up local aid activists and those suspected to be from western Sudan. Men were often executed while women were arrested, sometimes due to false allegations made to settle personal scores.

According to Osman, a man accused one woman of being a collaborator because she refused to have sex with him. Yasser also suspects that his neighbors in Kassala slandered his daughter as a spy after they got into a dispute.

Originally from Darfur, he suspects his neighbors are prejudiced. Like the security forces, many communities in central, eastern, and northern Sudan perceive anyone from the west as sympathizing with the RSF. Still, Yasser is grateful that his lawyers convinced a judge to overturn his daughter’s death sentence.

Others have not been so lucky. In April 2025, the International Service for Human Rights, a non-profit from Geneva, Switzerland, identified at least 25 women charged with treason, some of whom face execution. Most are between the ages of 19 and 26 and one is a minor.

Yasser fears that many more people will be killed or arrested with a veneer of legality while war criminals go free.

“Sometimes I ask myself: are we even human beings? Human beings are supposed to have reason, ethics, and conscience. But what’s happening to me and so many others is deeply immoral,” he said.

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