Surrounded by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the residents of Al-Sigheia had three options for escaping their attackers. The first was to throw themselves into the Nile and risk drowning. The second was to sneak off into the night through the fields bordering the small town in the Gezira region, an agricultural area southeast of Sudan's capital city Khartoum. The third: hunkering down at home, hoping not to be beaten, raped or killed as militiamen ransacked the village.

After three days of siege, 22-year-old Abu Zeid Mudassir opted for the second solution. "The soldiers had installed a machine gun on the roof of the school. They fired on sight, even at the inhabitants coming out of the mosque," he recalled. At dawn on October 24, the young man fled with his family across the countryside, covering more than 50 kilometers on foot, sleeping on the ground, hidden among the corncobs.

Al-Sigheia, Rufaa, Tamboul, Al-Sariha, Al-Hilaliya... One after the other, more than a hundred towns and villages in the Gezira region have been taken by storm by the RSF, led by General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, known as "Hemedti." Between October 20 and November 10, at least 1,245 civilians were killed in the region, according to estimates verified by Le Monde, and two to three times as many were wounded.

Punitive expeditions

A commander's betrayal was at the root of the carnage. On October 20, Abu Agla Keikal, commander of the RSF in eastern Gezira, sided with General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan's Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), who since late September had seemed to be regaining the upper hand on the battlefield in the capital and on several fronts in the east of the country.

When the regular army rushed to announce the rallying of Abu Agla Keikal and his troops, estimated at 400 soldiers, the locals initially celebrated the news, thinking they had been freed from the yoke of the paramilitaries who had ruled the Gezira region with an iron fist since December 2023. Their joy was short-lived. Commander Keikal's forces, which had until then kept the RSF's abuses to a minimum east of the Nile, suddenly withdrew, leaving the population defenseless.

In retaliation for the humiliating defection, paramilitary militias ran multiple punitive expeditions under the pretext of hunting down army collaborators. The massive campaign of vengeance, mainly targeting members of the Shukriya tribe – from which the defector came – quickly turned into a raid accompanied by massacres and forced displacements, without any reaction from the regular army that was posted on the outskirts of the region.

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