Imagine waking up to the sounds of gunfire echoing through your hometown, where your family's roots stretch back generations, only to discover that you're suddenly seen as an outsider in your own land. This chilling reality has unfolded for countless civilians in Sudan's ongoing civil war, where ethnic tensions and brutal power struggles have turned the country into a battleground of unimaginable horror. But here's where it gets controversial: while both sides of the conflict—the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—stand accused of atrocities, evidence points to a deliberate campaign by the SAF to ethnically cleanse certain communities, raising questions about accountability and international intervention that most people overlook in the broader headlines of war.
Over two years into this devastating civil war, the clashes between the SAF, led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the RSF, commanded by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, have torn Sudan apart, creating what the world calls its most severe humanitarian disaster. Civilians find themselves trapped in the crossfire as control over cities and regions shifts back and forth between these warring factions, turning everyday life into a nightmare of displacement, starvation, and violence.
Both groups have inflicted horrific suffering on innocent people, but the RSF has faced particular scrutiny for its ethnically motivated attacks, which the U.S. State Department has labeled as atrocities and even genocide, leading to sanctions against RSF leaders. The European Union has echoed this stance, imposing penalties on Dagalo and the RSF for severe human rights violations. Numerous reports have documented these crimes against civilians by the RSF. On the other side, Burhan's SAF has also been sanctioned, yet he's managed to deflect attention from his forces' alleged wrongdoings by shifting blame squarely onto the RSF, keeping his own atrocities largely hidden from the spotlight.
And this is the part most people miss: through a months-long investigation conducted in partnership with CNN and published in outlets like Sudan War Monitor and Trouw, Lighthouse Reports and CNN have uncovered solid proof of the Sudanese Armed Forces' methodical persecution of civilians in Gezira state, driven by ethnic prejudices. This isn't just random violence—it's a calculated assault on specific groups, sparking debates about whether this amounts to state-sponsored ethnic cleansing or something even more sinister.
Let's dive into the details. In early 2025, after the RSF had held the central city of Wad Madani in Gezira state for over a year, the SAF reclaimed it. They claimed they were launching a 'cleanup' operation to root out 'rebel pockets' in the surrounding areas. In truth, this was a smokescreen for the SAF and its allied Islamist-backed militias, including the Sudan Shield Forces, to unleash a widespread offensive against non-Arab civilians across the entire state. The assaults on these communities kicked off in October 2024, building up to the recapture of Madani, and persisted for several months afterward, long after the city changed hands.
To understand this better, picture the Kanabi—a resilient farming community mostly comprising non-Arab, Black Sudanese people. Many of them hail from regions like Darfur and Kordofan, having relocated to Gezira state in the 1950s as laborers seeking better opportunities. They've faced systemic discrimination from the Arab-dominated government because of their ethnicity, living in rural villages known as kambos. These deep-seated ethnic divides, which fueled the state-sponsored genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s, have marginalized the Kanabi for decades. The SAF exploited these fractures to justify their ruthless campaign in early 2025, aiming to expel the Kanabi from their ancestral lands and reshape the region's demographics.
Our collaborative probe revealed a grim tapestry of ethnic violence, including mass murders and the disposal of bodies in mass graves and waterways. By cross-verifying hundreds of videos, analyzing satellite images, and conducting exclusive on-the-ground interviews with SAF defectors and survivors from various kambos, we've painted a disturbing portrait: a military strategy specifically aimed at civilians, the deployment of uncontrolled paramilitary units aligned with the SAF, and frantic attempts to conceal the evidence of their deeds.
The SAF and Sudan's General Intelligence Service declined to comment on our findings. Meanwhile, the Sudan Shield Forces insisted that their troops do not discriminate against civilians on ethnic grounds and strictly follow engagement rules and international humanitarian laws. Yet, multiple high-ranking sources told Lighthouse Reports and CNN that the directives for this campaign originated from the top echelons of the SAF and influential Islamist figures who pressure the military leadership—raising eyebrows about who truly pulls the strings in this conflict.
Now, let's talk about how we pieced this together. Our main evidence came from in-depth interviews with survivors and insiders, which we organized into two specialized databases for tracking crimes and connections. The first database archives nearly 600 pieces of public visual content from platforms like Facebook, Telegram, WhatsApp, and occasionally X (formerly Twitter), making them easily searchable by thumbnails and tags related to specific types of atrocities. The second database maps out locations, dates, and details of attacks on kambos, linking videos to rural coordinates, survivor accounts, and supplementary data such as satellite images, fire patterns, weather records, shadow analyses, local news, NGO reports, and conflict statistics from groups like the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) Project.
Applying a rigorous three-source verification rule, we confirmed 59 attacks on kambos between October 2024 and May 2025, with an additional 87 incidents reported through interviews and open sources. We also authenticated and pinpointed over 50 videos showing SAF activities, assaults on civilians (including the notorious police bridge massacre), and raids on kambos involving arson and mass burials.
To safeguard our sources—because this kind of reporting in a war zone is incredibly risky—we took protective steps like blurring faces in visuals, permanently deleting sensitive materials from devices, communicating via encrypted apps like Signal, and storing notes offline instead of in cloud services.
Shifting to the human stories behind the numbers, Sudan's war, fueled by two ambitious generals and foreign proxies on both sides, has raged for over two years with scant global attention. Death toll estimates exceed 150,000 Sudanese lives lost, and countless massacres remain untold, leaving families in agonizing limbo, wondering if their missing loved ones are alive or gone forever. Many have been coerced into allegiance with one side or the other just to survive.
In the tragic saga of the Kanabi killings, the SAF and its paramilitary and local militia partners seized on military advances to reclaim territories from the RSF as opportunities to 'purify' the land by removing groups they view as unwelcome outsiders. Through a team of local journalists and our own reporters embedded in Sudan, we connected with Kanabi survivors and SAF whistleblowers.
In features aired on CNN, published in Trouw, and shared via Sudan War Monitor, victims like Miriam (whose identity we've altered for protection) recounted the day SAF troops paraded through the streets of her hometown in central Gezira state to wrest it from RSF control. Miriam was home with her sons when the soldiers advanced toward Wad Madani, but four of them broke off to her house and demanded her sons leave with them. 'They proclaimed that anyone from the Blue Nile area had to go,' she recalled, referring to a region inhabited by non-Arab, African tribes. Her sons and a brother were whisked away on motorcycles, and as gunfire rang out all day and homes were torched, she later discovered that at least some of those bullets had claimed their lives. She fled with another brother, Suleiman, narrowly escaping the same fate.
At least seven other survivors from Gezira state shared eerily similar tales of being singled out mercilessly for their ethnicity and labeled as intruders, despite generations of farming in the area—echoing the persecution faced by non-Arab regions under the SAF and past regimes.
Insiders from the SAF and allied groups corroborated these survivor accounts, describing orchestrated civilian targeting that matched the patterns of brutality we've documented.
One local leader in Gezira witnessed SAF personnel tossing three corpses into a canal and later toured the state, surveying razed kambos—even some untouched by the RSF. 'What's unfolding in Gezira,' he lamented, 'is their [SAF's] intent to eradicate zones where Africans form the majority.'
But here's the controversial twist that begs for debate: Is this ethnic targeting a relic of Sudan's long history of division, or a deliberate strategy by the SAF to consolidate power and land? And does the international community's silence on SAF's actions compared to the RSF's sanctions reveal a bias, or just the fog of war? What do you think—should leaders like Burhan face the same global outcry as Dagalo, or is there a hidden agenda at play? Share your thoughts in the comments: Do you agree this is genocide, or is it something else? How should the world respond to protect vulnerable communities like the Kanabi? Let's discuss!
