THE HAGUE, Netherlands (CN) — More than 20 years after the first massacres in Darfur, the International Criminal Court finally delivered its verdict.
A panel of three judges found Sudanese militia leader Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman — better known by his nickname Ali Kushayb — guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity for leading brutal attacks on non-Arab villages during Sudan’s counterinsurgency campaign from 2003 to 2004.
In their ruling, the judges said the evidence left no doubt that the violence was part of a larger plan. The attacks, they wrote, were not random bursts of brutality but a coordinated campaign against civilians, carried out under a state policy designed to silence and crush opposition in Darfur.
For many in Darfur, it was a moment they feared would never come. The long-awaited judgment was the first conviction by the ICC related to the Darfur conflict, and one of the most significant since the court was created in 2002 to prosecute the world’s worst crimes. Inside the courtroom, a few people in the public gallery quietly wiped away tears as the judges read the verdict.
Abd-Al-Rahman, a former officer in the Sudanese Armed Forces, was accused of commanding the Janjaweed, government-backed militias made up largely of Arab fighters who became notorious for burning villages and attacking civilians in Darfur as part of a campaign to crush rebellion by non-Arab groups demanding equality.
Between August 2003 and March 2004, his fighters carried out what judges described as “armed operations against several predominantly Fur and non-Arab villages in Darfur.” The ruling says villages were “pillaged and civilians were murdered, raped, persecuted, mistreated and forcibly displaced.”
The man behind the Janjaweed
Born in 1949 in the South Darfur town of Rahad Al-Berdi, Abd-Al-Rahman spent much of his early life in the Sudanese army, eventually rising to the rank of warrant officer. After retiring in the 1990s, he settled in Garsila, where he ran a small pharmacy selling medicine in the local market. But when the Darfur rebellion broke out in 2003, he reemerged as a local militia leader, joining the government’s so-called Emergency Plan to crush dissent across the region.
The court found that he took command of Janjaweed forces in the Wadi Salih and Mukjar areas, “exercising oversight in relation to recruitment, distribution of ammunition, weapons, supplies and salaries.” Working alongside government troops, he helped lead coordinated assaults that left entire communities in ruins.
For several days in August 2003, Abd-Al-Rahman’s men swept through the Darfuri towns of Kodoom and Bindisi, hunting down Fur men, torturing them and taking them outside town to be executed. Witnesses told judges how gunmen burst into homes, shot people trying to flee and set whole neighborhoods ablaze. One survivor remembered seeing men tied up and loaded onto trucks, never to return. Another said he heard gunfire echoing from the outskirts and later found the bodies of his relatives.
The same horror returned in early 2004 in the towns of Mukjar and Deleig. Men were packed into cells without food or water, beaten for days, then taken away in groups to be killed. Women told the court they were dragged from their homes and assaulted as flames consumed their villages behind them.
According to the court, none of it was random. The violence was part of a deliberate campaign to terrorize non-Arab communities accused of siding with rebels, with villages emptied, women raped and homes turned to ash as government troops and their allied militias tightened their grip on the region.
In the judges’ view, Abd-Al-Rahman’s part in the atrocities was neither symbolic nor secondary. He “exercised effective command and control” over his men and worked closely with Sudanese forces, turning local militias into instruments of state violence.
