Politics
Men shot by hundreds, disappeared after ‘Sudanese city falls to paramilitaries’
- Witness describes summary killings near reservoir.
- Rapid Support Forces deny summary executions.
- Capture of al-Fashir entrenches division of Sudan.
Fighters riding camels rounded up a couple of hundred men near the Sudanese city of al-Fashir at the weekend and brought them to a reservoir, shouting racial slurs before starting to shoot, according to a man who said he was among them.
One of the captors recognised him from his school days and let him flee, the man, Alkheir Ismail, said in a video interview conducted by a local journalist in the nearby town of Tawila in the country’s western Darfur region.
“He told them, ‘Don’t kill him,'” Ismail said. “Even after they killed everyone else — my friends and everyone else.”
He said he had been bringing food to relatives still in the city when it was captured by the Rapid Support Forces on Sunday — and, like the other detainees, was unarmed. Reuters could not immediately verify his account.
Ismail was one of four such witnesses and six aid workers interviewed by Reuters who also said people fleeing al-Fashir had been gathered in nearby villages and men separated from women and removed. In an earlier account, one of the witnesses said gunshots then rang out.
Activists and analysts have long warned of revenge killings based on ethnicity by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) if they seized al-Fashir — the last stronghold of the Sudanese military in Darfur.
The UN human rights office shared other accounts on Friday, estimating hundreds of civilians and unarmed fighters may have been executed. Such killings are considered war crimes.
The RSF, whose victory in al-Fashir marks a milestone in Sudan’s two-and-a-half-year civil war, has denied such abuses – saying the accounts have been manufactured by its enemies and making counter-accusations against them.
RSF says men removed for interrogation
Reuters has verified at least three videos posted on social media showing men in RSF uniforms shooting unarmed captives and a dozen more showing clusters of bodies after apparent shootings.
A high-level RSF commander called the accounts “media exaggeration” by the army and its allied fighters “to cover up for their defeat and loss of al-Fashir”.
The RSF’s leadership had ordered investigations into any violations by RSF individuals and several had been arrested, he said, adding that the RSF had helped people leave the city and called on aid organisations to assist those who remained.
He said soldiers and fighters pretending to be civilians had been taken away for interrogation. “There were no killings as has been claimed,” the commander told Reuters in response to a request for comment.
Several eyewitnesses told global medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) that a group of 500 civilians and soldiers from the Sudanese Armed Forces and allied groups tried to flee on October 26, but most were killed or captured by the RSF and its allies.
“Survivors report individuals being separated by gender, age, or perceived ethnic identity, and many who remain held for ransom, with sums ranging from 5 million to 30 million Sudanese pounds ($8,000 to $50,000),” MSF said in a statement on Friday.
The RSF’s capture of al-Fashir entrenches the geographical division of a country already reduced by the independence of South Sudan in 2011 after decades of civil war.
In a speech on Wednesday night, RSF head Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo called on his fighters to protect civilians and said violations will be prosecuted. He appeared to acknowledge reports of detentions by ordering the release of detainees.
Alex de Waal, a genocide expert and specialist on Darfur, said the reported RSF acts in al-Fashir looked “very similar to what they did in Geneina and elsewhere,” referring to another Darfur city the RSF took during the latest war’s early stages as well as the early 2000s conflict.
‘We can’t say they are alive’
Mary Brace, a protection adviser at Nonviolent Peaceforce, an NGO working in Tawila, said those arriving “are women, children, and older men generally,” adding that trucks organised by the RSF have taken some people from Garney to Tawila while others have been taken elsewhere.
The RSF on Thursday posted a video it said showed the provision of food and medical aid to people displaced in Garney. Aid workers said the force may also be trying to keep people in towns it controls to attract foreign aid.
Some 260,000 people were still in al-Fashir around the time of the attack, but only 62,000 have been counted elsewhere, and only several thousand of them in Tawila, which is controlled by a neutral force.
In another of the testimonies obtained and verified by Reuters, Tahani Hassan, a former hospital cleaner, said she fled to Tawila early on Sunday after her brother-in-law and uncle were killed by stray bullets.
On the way, she and her family were apprehended by three men in RSF uniforms who searched them, beat them and insulted them, she said.
“They hit us hard. They threw our clothes on the ground. Even I, as a woman, was searched,” she said, adding that their food and water were also spilled on the ground.
They eventually made it to Garney, where the fighters separated women and children from the men, most of whom they did not see again, including her brother and a second brother-in-law.
“We can’t say they are alive, because of how they treated us,” Hassan said. “If they don’t kill you, the hunger will kill you, the thirst will kill you.”
- Police called after reports of train stabbings.
- Senior officials inform armed cops enter train.
- Eyewitnesses say one suspect tasered by police.
Multiple people were taken to the hospital after a series of stabbings on a train near Cambridge in eastern England on Saturday, and two men have been arrested, in what Prime Minister Keir Starmer called an “appalling incident.”
British police and ambulance services said several people had been stabbed on the train, which stopped at Huntingdon, with armed officers seen entering the train in videos on social media.
Cambridgeshire police said they were called at 1939 GMT after reports that multiple people had been stabbed on a train.
“Armed officers attended and the train was stopped at Huntingdon, where two men were arrested. A number of people have been taken to hospital,” the police said in a statement.
The East of England Ambulance Service said it mobilised a large-scale response to Huntingdon Railway Station, which included numerous ambulances and critical care teams, including three air ambulances.
“We can confirm we have transported multiple patients to hospital,” it said.
One eyewitness told Sky News that one of the suspects, waving a large knife, was tasered by police.
PM Starmer posted on X that the incident was “deeply concerning.”
“My thoughts are with all those affected, and my thanks go to the emergency services for their response,” he said.
Politics
‘Guns-a-blazing’:Trump threatens US military action in Nigeria over treatment of Christians
- Trump warns of “guns-a-blazing” strike to “fully wipe out” militants.
- Says goal is to target “terrorists committing horrible atrocities.”
- Instructs “Department of War” to prepare for possible action.
US President Donald Trump said on Saturday that he has asked the Defence Department to prepare for possible military action in Nigeria if the Nigerian government “continues to allow the killing of Christians.”
The US government will also immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, Trump said in a post on Truth Social.
Trump said the US may “very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the … Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.”
“I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action. If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians! WARNING: THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT BETTER MOVE FAST!” he further wrote in the post.
Trump’s smoking statement comes hours after the Nigerian government vowed to keep fighting violent extremism and said it hoped Washington would remain a close ally after Trump added the West African nation to a US watch list over what he said were threats to Christianity.
“The Federal Government of Nigeria will continue to defend all citizens, irrespective of race, creed, or religion. Like America, Nigeria has no option but to celebrate the diversity that is our greatest strength,” its Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.
“Nigeria is a God-fearing country where we respect faith, tolerance, diversity and inclusion, in concurrence with the rules-based international order,” the ministry added.
On Friday, Trump said he was putting Nigeria, Africa’s top oil producer and most populous country, on a “Countries of Particular Concern” list of nations the US finds have engaged in religious freedom violations, which also includes China, Myanmar, North Korea, Russia and Pakistan.
The Republican US President had designated the country a concern during his first term in the White House, but his Democratic successor Joe Biden removed it from the US State Department list in 2021.
“Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria. Thousands of Christians are being killed. Radicals are responsible for this mass slaughter,” he wrote in a social media post on Friday without offering any specifics.
A nation of more than 200 ethnic groups practising Christianity, Islam and traditional religions, Nigeria has a long history of peaceful coexistence with mosques and churches dotting its cities.
But it also has a long history of violence breaking out between groups, in which religious differences sometimes overlap with other fault lines such as ethnic divisions or conflict over scarce land and water resources.
For 15 years, the extremist armed group Boko Haram has also terrorised northeast Nigeria, an insurgency that has killed tens of thousands of people, mostly Muslims.
Trump also asked the US House of Representatives Appropriations Committee to examine the issue and report back to him. A US congressional subcommittee held a hearing on Christian killings in Nigeria earlier this year.
Appropriations Committee Chairman US Representative Tom Cole, in an X post on Friday, said the designation “sends a strong message: the US will not ignore Christian persecution.”
US Vice President JD Vance has defended saying that he hopes his wife Usha — who was raised as a Hindu — converts to Christianity.
A fervent Catholic who himself converted in 2019, Vance said on Friday that pushback against his remarks reek of “anti-Christian bigotry.”
The 41-year-old was asked about raising their three children in an interfaith marriage at a Turning Point USA event honoring assassinated right-wing activist Charlie Kirk at the University of Mississippi on Wednesday.
“Do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved in by church? Yeah, I honestly do wish that,” he said.
“But if she doesn’t, then God says everybody has free will, and so that doesn’t cause a problem for me.”
Vance, who has been tipped by President Donald Trump as a likely candidate in the 2028 US election, then responded to criticism of his remarks on social media.
Replying to one critic who accused him on X of throwing the Second Lady’s religion “under the bus” to placate right-wingers, Vance replied: “What a disgusting comment, and it’s hardly been the only one along these lines.”
“She is not a Christian and has no plans to convert, but like many people in an interfaith marriage — or any interfaith relationship — I hope she may one day see things as I do,” Vance wrote.
Usha Vance was born in San Diego to parents who emigrated from India. She told Fox News in 2024 that her parents’ Hindu religion helped make them “really good people.”
Vance was raised as an evangelical in a chaotic and sometimes deprived upbringing that he described in his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.”
The couple met at Yale Law School and married in 2014.
Since Vance’s conversion to Catholicism five years later, he has frequently spoken about how his faith has informed his conservative political views.
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