Tracking War Crimes in Sudan

By Sanjana VargheseI’m a reporter on the Visual Investigations team.Sudan’s military and a powerful paramilitary — both armed by foreign powers — have spent almost two years at war, and their battle has laid waste to the country.Many tens of thousands of civilians have been killed.

Close to 12 million people have been displaced.There is famine.The U.S.

and the U.N.have accused both sides of war crimes — attacks on civilians, destruction of hospitals and schools, starvation as a weapon of war and sexual violence.

How bad were these crimes and who was responsible? The Visual Investigations team wanted to find out.We’ve just published the results of a six-month investigation documenting what we discovered.We focused on one side, the Rapid Support Forces (R.S.F.), a paramilitary group, for a few reasons.

First, evidence suggested that it was carrying out crimes against humanity.Second, observers outside the country didn’t have a good sense of who, below the top level, was running the group.

And third, the leaders were going unpunished.I’ll share what we found in today’s newsletter.Unmasking the commandersWe started with two questions: Who were the men behind the massacres, and what did we know about their abuses? The R.S.F.is not a regular army, so it doesn’t publicize a formal command structure.We found something that could help us build an org chart: a profusion of conflict videos.

There are two kinds.Officers were casting themselves as noble defenders of democracy in slick propaganda videos.

At the same time, rank-and-file soldiers were posting trophy videos in private channels that showed them abusing civilians.All this helped us identify at least 20 R.S.F.commanders and locate many of them at or near several atrocities.

We verified and geolocated hundreds of videos.With the help of others — Sudan specialists, U.N.

investigators, experts on paramilitary groups and researchers with the Centre for Information Resilience — we showed the...