On April 11, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) stormed the Zamzam displacement camp in Sudan’s North Darfur, burning huts and shops, executing medics, and firing at fleeing civilians.
According to monitors, at least 500 people – men, women, children and the elderly – were killed, and hundreds of thousands were forcibly displaced.
The attack provoked global outrage, prompting the RSF to double down on propaganda it had been spreading for months about Zamzam – that it was actually a military barracks.
“Zamzam was a military zone … so the RSF decided that we should evacuate civilians,” RSF adviser Ali Musabel told Al Jazeera, without providing evidence for his claim. “We didn’t want civilians to get caught in the crossfire.”
By labelling Zamzam a military zone, the RSF was trying to apply the same model Israel uses to justify bombing hospitals and schools in the Gaza Strip, said Rifaat Makawi, a Sudanese human rights lawyer.
“This is not a coincidence: it is a deliberate practice aimed at stripping civilians of their legal protection by labelling them as combatants or instruments of war,” he told Al Jazeera.
A template for genocide
Throughout Sudan’s civil war, the RSF has used human rights jargon and terms from international humanitarian law (IHL) – the legal framework designed to protect civilians in times of war – to carry out atrocities.
For years, Israel employed this practice in an attempt to ward off criticism for killing and oppressing Palestinians, according to legal scholars. Since launching its genocidal war on Gaza on October 7, 2023, it has doubled down.
It claims hospitals in Gaza are Hamas “control-and-command centres” – trying to justify attacking health facilities, which are protected under IHL. It also claims Hamas hides among civilians to use them as “human shields” to justify disproportionate and intentional attacks against those same civilians.
In addition, it has branded its mass expulsions of civilians as “humanitarian” evacuations, giving people hours to pack up their entire lives and get out of the way of Israeli bombs, if they can.
Israel stands accused of genocide by rights groups and United Nations experts for its war that has killed at least 52,567 Palestinians.
And the RSF is increasingly adopting Israel’s strategy, local monitors and legal experts say.
“The fact that the claims made by the RSF in Sudan resemble the claims Israel is making in Gaza … reveals the emergence of a template to commit mass extermination and even genocide,” said Luigi Daniele, a senior lecturer on IHL at Nottingham Law School.
The UN accuses both sides in Sudan’s war of committing grave crimes, such as killing and torturing prisoners of war, since a power struggle between the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) erupted into an all-out civil war in April 2023.
Human rights groups accuse the RSF of perpetrating additional atrocities, including carrying out a possible genocide against the “non-Arab” communities in Darfur.
From Janjaweed to human rights language
The RSF emerged from the nomadic “Arab” militias in Darfur, which became known as the Janjaweed (devils on horseback in Sudanese Arabic) for the countless atrocities they committed.
The army used the Janjaweed to crush a rebellion by sedentary farming “non-Arab” communities that started in 2003. The sedentary communities were protesting against their political and economic marginalisation in Sudan.
SAF and RSF were closely aligned until at least 2021, when they came together to overthrow the civilian administration with which they had been sharing power after a popular uprising toppled autocratic President Omar al-Bashir in 2019.
Shortly after the coup, the RSF signed a memorandum of understanding with the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) to receive human rights training.
Now, the RSF and its political allies are using human rights terminology to try to whitewash their atrocities.
On March 8, an RSF-backed political alliance, Tasis (Foundation), tweeted: “We stand in solidarity with Sudanese women in their recent ordeal, where they have faced particularly tragic conditions and been subjected to horrific violations, as a result of the unjust war.”
Tasis made no mention of the reports published by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which accuse the RSF of widespread sexual violence and rape throughout the war.
During the raid on Zamzam, the RSF reportedly abducted 25 women and girls and raped others, according to the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa, a local monitor documenting sexual violence in the region.
“What I see today in Darfur, and specifically in Zamzam, is not merely a violation of the IHL, but evidence of its distortion and transformation into a cover under which the gravest crimes are committed,” human rights lawyer Makawi told Al Jazeera.
Finishing the genocide?
The Zamzam camp sprang up in 2003, 15km (9.3 miles) from North Darfur’s capital, el-Fasher, to shelter “non-Arab” Zaghawa and Fur communities, which fled Popular Defence Forces’ violence during the first Darfur war.
Both communities suffered genocidal levels of violence and were expelled from their lands by the state-backed Janjaweed. Zamzam soon became a symbol of the atrocities they endured.
Some 350,000 people settled in the camp, swelling to more than half a million as the RSF and the army went to war and the paramilitary group captured South, East, West and Central Darfur states in late 2023.
In April 2024, the RSF besieged el-Fasher and surrounding towns after the Joint Forces – a coalition of “non-Arab” armed groups formed to fight the government in the past – shed their neutrality and sided with the army.
Given the RSF’s track record of enmity towards “non-Arab” ethnic groups, the Joint Forces feared widespread ethnic killings if the RSF captured the entire state.
The RSF blocked aid from anyone not aligned with them, leading to famine in Zamzam. As civilians withered away from hunger, the RSF began claiming that Zamzam was a “military base”, revealing its intention to attack.
“This claim that there was a military base in Zamzam was never correct … we had some people who acted as a police force, but there were no military leaders in the camp,” said Mosab, a middle-aged man who survived the killing in Zamzam and now languishes in the nearby town of Tawila.
Musabel, the RSF adviser, told Al Jazeera that the high civilian death toll was due to the Joint Forces using “human shields”, without providing evidence.
Ethnic cleansing
The RSF has also mimicked the Israeli tactic of carrying out mass expulsions under a humanitarian guise.
Since October 7, 2023, Israel has pushed 2.3 million Palestinians into smaller and smaller pockets of land, which it describes as “safe zones” in Gaza.
Israel bombs or invades those areas, claiming they “became military targets” due to the ostensible presence of someone from Hamas there.
“What Israel has done in Gaza, in reality, has been issuing mass expulsion orders under threats of extermination, which is a declaration of intent to commit international crimes,” Nottingham Law School’s Daniele said.
On April 11, Tasis posted on Facebook, calling for civilians to flee Zamzam through what it called “humanitarian corridors” leading to nearby towns such as Tawila and Korma.
Yet on April 27, an RSF commander was seen announcing the detention of a group of unarmed men who fled Zamzam through a supposed humanitarian corridor to Tawila, in a video verified by Al Jazeera’s authentication unit, Sanad.
He said the men had sided against their Darfuri brethren and with the traditional elite, represented in the “Arab” Jalaba tribes who live in central and northern Sudan and comprise much of Sudan’s military and political elite. He added that they might kill the detained men to serve as an example to others.
The RSF has framed its war against the army as a fight on behalf of peripheral tribes against the central elite, while at the same time committing egregious abuses against the most marginalised tribes in Darfur.
The detainees were relief workers, according to local monitors, who fear they were killed. Al Jazeera was unable to confirm their fate.
Survivors told Al Jazeera that the RSF had carried out ethnic cleansing, possibly amounting to several war crimes.
“Some of us were executed [by the RSF] along [the road out of Zamzam] and others were violently displaced,” said Mohamed Idriss*, who walked for 13 hours before arriving in el-Fasher.
“We were exposed to so many violations, [the RSF] committed massacres and ethnic cleansing,” he told Al Jazeera.
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