Sudan's West Darfur governor killed by suspected RSF fighters

Gunmen thought to be from Sudan's Rapid Support Forces have killed the pro-army governor of West Darfur, Khamis Abekr, shortly after he gave an interview blaming the paramilitary unit for a wave of killings and looting in the embattled town of Al Geneina.

Videos shared online show armed men in camouflage fatigues similar to those worn by RSF fighters take him out of the back of an all-terrain vehicle and shove him into a room. One of the men is seen hitting the governor, who had a blue helmet on, with a garden chair.

Another video shows his dead body soaked in blood with an apparent gunshot wound to the chest.

The RSF has not commented on the death of the governor.

The killing of the governor, a former rebel leader who signed a peace deal with the military in 2020, is expected to fuel the war between the RSF and the army, which entered its third month on Thursday. It also threatens to plunge Darfur back into a full-fledged civil war similar to that which tore it apart in the 2000s.

“The assassination of the governor of West Darfur with this degree of barbarism and brutality underlines the need for UN and African Union intervention to stop these wholesale massacres,” said Darfur activist Nafeesa Hagar.

Mr Abekr told Saudi-owned television network Al Hadath in a telephone interview hours before he was killed on Wednesday that Al Geneina had been destroyed and accused the RSF of genocide.

“The whole town has been ravaged by the Rapid Support Forces and allied militias,” he said.

Gunfire could be heard in the background as he spoke.

“Civilians are being killed randomly and in large numbers,” he told Al Hadath.

The governor said the conflict began when the RSF and allied militias struck areas of Al Geneina, where members of the ethnic African Masalit tribe live, with the attacks having now spread across the entire city.

Apart from Khartoum, Al Geneina has been the site of the worst fighting between the army and the RSF.

Activists in the area say at least 1,100 people have been killed in Darfur since the war started on April 15. Tens of thousands have been forced to flee their homes, mainly to neighbouring Chad, as the RSF and its allied Arab militiamen took on former rebels there in what appeared to be a replay of the Darfur civil war.

The violence in Darfur has not been restricted to Al Geneina, Sudan's westernmost town near the Chad border. There have been reports of violence involving the RSF and active rebels in Nyala, Zalengei and El Fasher.

In North Darfur, where El Fasher is located, more than 100 people have been killed in violent clashes in and near camps for displaced people, according to the UN's High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi.

“There are shocking reports of horrific sexual violence against women and girls. This will worsen unless the parties to the conflict agree to end a fight that is destroying Sudan,” he wrote on Twitter on Thursday.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said he was “highly worried about the increasing ethnic dimension of the violence, as well as by reports of sexual violence”.

His special representative to Sudan, Volker Perthes, blamed “Arab militias and some armed men in RSF's uniform”.

The RSF called the fighting in Al Geneina a tribal conflict, blaming the country's former regime for fanning the flames. It said it had been making efforts to get aid into the city.

The Doctors' Committee for West Darfur said there had been extrajudicial killings, activist assassinations and forced disappearances in Al Geneina in recent days, with civilians denied access to water.

“Every day that passes with Al Geneina isolated means more victims and more tragedies,” it said, calling for the UN and African Union to intervene to stop the violence.

The Darfur Lawyers' Association said the killing was an act of “barbarism, brutality and cruelty.”

The RSF has its roots in Darfur, where it started as a militia called the Janjaweed. It fought on the government's side against ethnic African rebels in a civil war in Darfur that began in 2003.

The war left 300,000 dead and displaced another 2.5 million.

The Janjaweed are accused of committing large-scale abuses against civilians in Darfur during that conflict, the root cause of which has never been dealt with despite a reduction in hostilities after the removal of dictator Omar Al Bashir in 2019, after 29 years in power.

Al Bashir was indicted more than a decade ago by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and genocide in Darfur. Gen Mohamed Dagalo, the RSF commander, is himself a former Janjaweed commander and a loyal Al Bashir ally.

Sudanese military and army chief Gen Abdel Fattah Al Burhan have strongly condemned the killing of Mr Abekr, which he blamed on the RSF.

He said the killing was part of the large-scale abuses by the RSF in Al Geneina and elsewhere in Sudan.

“It is a treacherous attack,” he said.

The army and the RSF have been locked in a war for supremacy since April 15, when weeks of tension boiled over into a conflict that turned the Sudanese capital into a war zone and led to a major humanitarian crisis.

The war has, so far, forced 2.2 million Sudanese to leave their homes in search of safety elsewhere in the country. Of these, 528,000 fled to neighbouring countries, including 220,000 to Egypt and nearly 150,000 to Chad. The war also killed more than 900 civilians, according to an independent medical group.