Children ‘piled up and shot’: new details emerge of ethnic cleansing in Darfur

Refugees wait for a food distribution point to open at a camp in Adré, Chad, on 22 April. More than 8 million people have been displaced since fighting erupted between the RSF and Sudan’s military in April 2023. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Gruesome new testimony details one of the worst atrocities of the year-long Sudanese civil war – the large-scale massacre of civilians as they desperately tried to flee an ethnic rampage in Darfur last summer.

Witnesses describe children, still alive, being “piled up and shot” by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) as they attempted to escape the regional capital of El Geneina in June last year during a bout of ethnic violence in which thousands of civilians were killed.