December 16, 2025
Sudan’s Armed Forces ethnically target farming communities amidst a famine
Over two years into Sudan’s civil war, fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces has ravaged and divided the country and led to the world’s most dire humanitarian crisis. More so than ever, civilians are caught in the middle of intense fighting as cities and regions change hands between the two sides.
Both sides have targeted civilians with unimaginable brutality. The US State Department has sanctioned RSF leadership for ethnically-targeted atrocities and genocide. The EU has also sanctioned the RSF and its leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo for grave human rights abuses. Crimes against civilians by the RSF have been widely documented. The army’s leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan is also sanctioned but Burhan has managed to keep the alleged crimes his forces have committed in the shadows while redirecting war crimes allegations to the RSF.
In a monthslong investigation in collaboration with CNN and distributed in Sudan War Monitor and Trouw, Lighthouse Reports and CNN can reveal evidence of the Sudanese Armed Forces’ systematic targeting of civilians in Gezira state on an ethnic basis.
In early 2025, after more than a year under the occupation of the RSF, the central city of Wad Madani in Gezira state was re-taken by SAF. SAF announced a cleanup operation of the city and surrounding “rebel pockets.”
In reality, the Sudanese Armed Forces and Islamist-backed allied militias including the Sudan Shield Forces used the operation in Madani as a pretext to launch an operation targeting non-Arab civilians across Gezira state. Attacks on these communities began in October 2024 in the leadup to the campaign to retake Madani and continued for several months after SAF regained Madani.
Sudanese farmers in Gezira state are known as the Kanabi, a farming community largely of non-Arab, Black Sudanese descent. Much of this community is from Darfur and Kordofan and moved to Gezira state in the 1950s as labourers. They have long been marginalised by the Arab-led state due to their ethnicity and live in villages called kambos. The same ethnic divisions that have plagued Sudan since the state-led Darfur genocide in the early 2000’s have driven the marginalisation of the Kanabi for decades. SAF capitalised on these divisions in part to target the Kanabi and drive them from their land in their vicious early 2025 campaign.
Our joint investigation uncovered extensive evidence of ethnic violence, mass killings, and dumping of bodies into mass graves and canals.
The verification of hundreds of video, satellite imagery analysis and exclusive, on-the-ground interviews with SAF whistleblowers and survivors of attacks in different kambos reveals a harrowing picture of a targeted military campaign against civilians, the unleashing of undisciplined SAF-aligned paramilitary groups, and hurried efforts to hide evidence of their crimes.
SAF and the General Intelligence Service didn’t respond to our questions about our investigation. The Sudan Shield Forces stated that their forces are not targeting civilians based on their ethnicity and that their troops ‘strictly adhere to the rules of their engagement and International Humanitarian Law’.
Lighthouse Reports and CNN spoke to several high-level sources who all indicated that the orders for the campaign came from the highest ranks of SAF and influential Islamists who exert pressure on SAF leadership.
METHODS
Our primary sources, which included exclusive interviews with survivors and whistleblowers, informed two databases that we created to organize and store crime base and linkage evidence. The first contains nearly 600 archived open-source visual materials from social media platforms such as Facebook, Telegram, WhatsApp, and occasionally X, which we made searchable by thumbnail and thematic tags related to the type of atrocity crime. The second contains location, date, and descriptive information on kambo attacks. It links visual evidence with rural geolocations and witness testimonies. This database contains additional references to secondary sources, including satellite imagery, fire data, historical weather data, and shadow analysis, as well as local media, civil society reports, and conflict data from Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) and Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) Project.
Using a three-source standard, we confirmed 59 verified kambo attacks between October 2024 and May 2025. An additional 87 attacks were reported across our collected interview and open sources. We also verified and geolocated over 50 videos documenting SAF presence, attacks against civilians during the police bridge massacre, and attacks on kambos, including arson and mass graves.
We took various measures to protect sources, such as hiding faces, deleting material from hard drives, using encrypted communication (Signal), and storing notes locally rather than in an encrypted Google Drive.
STORYLINES
The war in Sudan has consumed the nation – at the will of two warring generals and foreign, proxy powers fueling both sides – for over two years, with relatively little news coverage. Estimates put the death toll at over 150,000 Sudanese people.
Many massacres have gone undocumented, many still wonder if their loved ones are dead or alive, and most have been forced to choose sides at one point or another.
In the case of the Kanabi killings, SAF and their paramilitary and local militia allies capitalized on military operations to retake cities and towns from RSF to clear the land of people who their leadership fundamentally believes does not belong there.
Through a network of on-the-ground reporters and a Lighthouse Reports team on the ground in Sudan, we met survivors of the Kanabi killings and whistleblowers in the SAF and SAF-allied ranks.
In reports on CNN, Trouw, and Sudan War Monitor, civilians including Miriam (whose name has been changed for her own safety), told us about the day the Sudanese Armed Forces marched through the streets of her central Sudanese home town, in Gezira state, to take it back from the Rapid Support Forces. Miriam was at home with her sons and the army marched onward to Wad Madani but four soldiers came to her house and demanded the men – namely her four sons – come with them. “They said that no one from the Blue Nile region was allowed to stay,” Miriam explained, referring to an area where non-Arab, African tribes live. Her sons and brother were driven away by motorcycle. Shooting continued throughout the day and houses set alight by the army. Later, she would learn at least some of those shots killed her sons and brother. She managed to escape with her other brother, Suleiman.
At least 7 other survivors from Gezira State told similar stories of merciless targeting of civilians based on their ethnic group and the perception that – despite decades of living in Gezira state as farmers – they were foreigners, from non-Arab regions of Sudan that have long been persecuted by SAF and the former regime.
Whistleblowers within SAF and aligned groups shared accounts of targeting civilians that support the patterns of violence the survivors described to a Lighthouse Reports team on the ground.
One community leader in Gezira state recalled watching SAF soldiers dump three bodies into the canal and later traveled throughout Gezira state, taking account of destroyed kambos, including those that were never occupied by RSF in the first place.
“What is happening now in Gezira,” he said, “is that they [SAF] want to destroy the area[s] where an African majority lives.”