Rape, murder, looting: massacre in Ardamata is the latest chapter in Darfur’s horror story

After days of gunfire, shelling and killings, the townspeople gathered at the playing field and were told the battle was over. They were told they would be safe at home. But the next day the massacre began in earnest.

On 5 November, after capturing a Sudanese military base, fighters from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and allied Arab militia went house to house in Ardamata, a suburb of El Geneina, the capital of Sudan’s West Darfur region, in a frenzy of killing, according to witnesses.

The gunmen mostly sought out men and teenage boys from the Masalit community, an African ethnic group, accusing them of being fighters and harbouring weapons. Members of other black, non-Arab groups were targeted, too.

During their searches, they demanded to know their victims’ ethnicity, referring to them as “abeed” (slaves) and “nawab”, a racial insult that means “Africans”.

“They said this land belongs to them,” says Gamar Ibrahim, a farmer. A militiaman forced his way into Gamar’s home on 5 November and pulled him and his male relatives on to the street at gunpoint. The gunman released two of them after they denied that they were Masalit. Then he opened fire, killing two of Gamar’s nephews and his son-in-law.

Afterwards “others came and looted my house until sunset”, Gamar says.

It was a pattern of violence repeated across Ardamata and its camp for displaced people. Witnesses saw groups of men summarily shot at several locations. Whole neighbourhoods were stripped of their contents and homes were razed. Bodies were left to rot in the sun, and the stench of death hung over the town for days.

Two people reported girls being raped. The UN human rights office has said some people were burned alive.

The killings on 5 November came after a battle for the Sudanese military base, a regional headquarters on Ardamata’s eastern fringes. During days of fighting, dozens of people in residential neighbourhoods were killed by shelling, according to a community tally, while the RSF and Arab militia raided homes and shot Masalit community leaders and other civilians.

On the roads, people were robbed and murdered as they fled.

The UN says more than 800 people were killed. The Roots Organization for Human Rights and Violation Monitoring, a local NGO, has counted 1,300 dead, mostly civilians. Their details have been painstakingly recorded on a handwritten list that runs to dozens of tattered pages.

“These latest atrocities are seemingly part of a wide ethnic-cleansing campaign conducted by the RSF with the aim to eradicate the non-Arab Masalit community from West Darfur,” said Josep Borrell, the EU’s top diplomat, last month.

Many survivors fled to Chad, joining the half a million Sudanese who have arrived since war erupted between the RSF and the national military in April over a plan to merge the two forces. They have found shelter at a sprawling ad hoc camp at Adre, a desert town a few hundred metres inside the border.

The massacre at Ardamata is the conflict’s second round of killings against the Masalit in West Darfur. The first took place between April and June, with the RSF and Arab militias unleashing a campaign of rape and murder as they battled Masalit fighters over several weeks in El Geneina, a once-diverse city with a prewar population of 540,000 people.

It culminated on 14 June with the killing of the West Darfur governor, allegedly by the RSF. His murder sparked a mass exodus from the city. Many fled to Chad, while 70,000 others went to Ardamata, a few miles west, in the belief its army garrison would offer protection.

The violence in El Geneina and Ardamata has drawn parallels with the genocide of the mid-2000s, when Kalashnikov-wielding Arab militias called the Janjaweed crushed a rebellion by African groups in Darfur, killing an estimated 300,000. The RSF emerged out of the Janjaweed.

“We are seeing a repeat of the genocide,” says Kholood Khair, the founding director of the thinktank Confluence Advisory. “It is the same actors, but the RSF has many more resources today, so the violence could reach a level that surpasses 2003-05.”

After capturing El Geneina in June, the RSF gained yet more ground in Darfur, a western region about the size of France whose bloody politics have long been underscored by competition over land between farming African groups and semi-nomadic Arabs.

In October, the RSF took Nyala and Zalingei, the capitals of Central and South Darfur. Then it set its sights on the Sudanese military base at Ardamata.

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The first skirmishes began on 1 November, as the RSF took up positions around the base. In addition to soldiers, the garrison included fighters from the Sudanese Alliance, an armed Masalit faction with a strong presence in Ardamata.

When those inside the base refused to surrender, the RSF pummelled them with artillery and drones for two days. The military in the garrison returned fire, but were outgunned by the RSF’s superior hardware, according to reports.

There were heavy casualties. Abdulla al-Haj, a senior school student, who was receiving treatment at the base’s military hospital for a shrapnel wound, says a shell hit his ward on 2 November killing seven patients. Karam, a soldier who asked to be identified only by his first name, says 40 soldiers were killed in the eastern sector of the base on 3 November.

When it became clear the garrison could not hold out, its officers prepared to evacuate. They gathered a convoy of about 30 vehicles, and left in the early hours of 4 November, according to several soldiers’ reports.

They left the bulk of the garrison behind, eight soldiers said. “We found ourselves alone,” says one, Mohamed Hamad, who only learned of the retreat after dawn.

Karam came across the column of vehicles by chance, an hour before it left. He managed to secure a spot in an armoured car. Another soldier in the convoy, Mohamed Abdul, describes the retreat as chaotic. “The network was down and there was no power to charge the radios, so many soldiers were not told,” he says.

Five soldiers who left with the convoy said it was badly mauled in a series of ambushes. They had to abandon their cars, leaving behind wounded comrades. Many soldiers were killed or detained, they say. The survivors stumbled across the border on foot.

In Ardamata, the base fell quickly after clashes that spilled into the town. Soon afterwards, a group of community elders met RSF commanders and struck a deal: there would be a ceasefire and a collection of weapons.

The elders relayed the outcome of the meeting that night to a crowd of residents at the town’s playing field, according to some who attended. “They said the RSF will come into the community to carry out searches, but no one will harm us,” says Hamadi Abdullah, a carpenter. “The opposite happened.”

On the morning of 5 November, RSF fighters and Arab militiamen on horseback and motorbikes descended on the town. Hamadi was at his neighbour’s house when militiamen ordered all the men out at about 10am and led them to a patch of ground by a telephone tower. There, Hamadi was made to lie down with about 30 others.

“The commander said, ‘Shoot all of them.’ And they starting firing – pop, pop, pop, like this,” says Hamadi. “I left everything behind and accepted I was going to die.”

Hamadi estimates that 17 of the group were killed. Somehow he survived unscathed. Elsewhere in Ardamata, his brother and uncle were also killed, while five of his cousins are still missing.

Huda Suleiman, a construction labourer, was beaten with a hammer as militiamen looted her home. She says she watched her brother and two cousins as they were taken to the same telephone tower, made to lie down and then shot. She estimates 20 were killed. Hashim Abdullah, a labourer, also said he saw 20 people shot at the telephone tower.

It is not clear if these incidents were the same one as Hamadi described.

Similar scenes played out across the town. Mohamed Hamad, the soldier who was abandoned at the army base, spent several hours that day hiding in a tree after fleeing from the RSF. From his vantage point, he watched a group of RSF fighters and Arab militiamen round up and shoot dead a group of about 20 people at Ardamata’s playing field, he says.

Most residents spent the day huddled at home in terror. In the evening, once they felt it was safe enough to go out and check on relatives, they came across piles of bodies.

Ismail Mohamed, a tailor, walked through the town after sunset, angrily searching for the elders who had told the community they would be safe. On his way, he saw dozens of corpses in two different parts of the playing field.

“It looked as if they’d been shot there,” says Ismail, who served as the general secretary of the committee representing displaced people in Ardamata.

Minutes later, he came across another dozen corpses, heaped in front of the gate of a residential compound, he says. There were more dead scattered along the streets. “I found bodies in every corner,” he says.

Fifteen other witnesses described coming across similar scenes that evening.

Many people fled the town after dark. On the road, they passed through RSF checkpoints and had their phones, money and other belongings stolen.

At one point, they stopped a crowd of about 200 people, separated the men and women, and made everyone sit down, says Nadia Ahmed, a housewife. RSF gunmen then dragged three young women off a donkey cart and into a patch of nearby trees, where they were raped, Nadia says.

“It was dark, but we could hear the girls screaming,” says Nadia. “It lasted about 30 minutes and then they let us pass.”

Awatif Ibrahim also left that night on the road leading east out of Ardamata. At one point, her group was stopped by RSF and Arab militia, who took about 20 men to one side and shot them, she says. Awatif saw more unarmed men shot after crossing the bridge between Ardamata and El Geneina town.

“There were bodies everywhere,” says Awatif. “We had to step over them as we walked.”

In some places, the RSF prevented people who stayed in Ardamata from burying the bodies, says Yagoub Yahaya, a butcher. He and other volunteers only gained permission to collect the dead on 7 November. They spent several hours loading the rotting remains of their neighbours, about 80 in total, on to two trucks driven by RSF fighters.

“You would find two here, four there. It was all over, mostly teenage boys and some old men,” says Yagoub. In some cases, the dead were scooped up with a bulldozer. Yagoub knew many of them by name. He does not know what the RSF did with the bodies.

Mohamed Hassan, an imam, saw hundreds of bodies “lined up in rows” at the playing field when he went back to Ardamata on 7 November to salvage what was left of his home. He was later told they had been collected from around Ardamata and put there before burial.

In some cases, the killings took place before 5 November. The previous evening, nearly 50 people were killed on the eastern end of Ardamata’s bridge, after the army base fell to the RSF, according to Ismail Mohamed. Intisar Ahmed said her husband and his brother were killed earlier on 4 November, as they hid among some mango trees on the outskirts of Ardamata.

Mohamed, a student who asked to be identified only by his first name, describes how RSF fighters and Arab militia came to the home of his grandfather, a well-known elder, on 3 November. They shot his grandfather and two other male relatives in front of him.

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“They said, ‘We will not leave any educated Masalit alive, we will finish you,’” says Mohamed. Two of his uncles were arrested elsewhere in Ardamata and are still being held by the RSF, he says. They are not alone: more than 1,000 men are being detained at various locations at Ardamata and El Geneina, according to a list compiled by community leaders.

Mohamed escaped his grandfather’s killers by climbing over a wall as they sprayed bullets at him. On the edge of the town, he joined up with other men who were fleeing the fighting. The group was attacked by Arab militia shortly after sunset and again the next morning. “Many people fell down,” Mohamed says.

Mohamed eventually limped alone across the border into Chad. He walked much of the way barefoot because he feared the flip-flopping of his sandals would alert the militiamen.

A month on, he is haunted by nightmares that jolt him awake and leave him gasping for breath. “I remember everything during the night,” he says.