Janjaweed crimes in Gezira area against civilians, a military plan

Mohamed Jalal Hashim

Sudan Events-Kampala – June 10, 2024

The war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Janjaweed militias in Gezira area in central Sudan (which includes Gezira irrigation scheme (2 million acres with less than 8 million people), targeting defenseless citizens in their villages, in addition to being a deeply rooted behavior in their psyche that has continued for three decades in Darfur, is in fact something bigger than that.
These systematic crimes are nothing but a military plan recommended by military experts working with the UAE to drag the SAF into battles based on “decisive war tactics”, meaning that the army force moves immediately whenever it hears that such-and-such a village is under Janjaweed attack.
Every professional soldier knows that regular armies (unlike the police) only fight wars through a comprehensive and well-drawn plan.
According to witness testimonies and those who know the difficulty of moving between the villages of Gezira agricultural scheme and the sea through its secret channels, the Janjaweed militias move with ease as if they have satellite maps with precise coordinates drawn via satellite, which makes They rarely lose their way between their irrigation canal complex, and even worse in its vast plains with their crisscrossing dirt roads.
This is evident in their precise movements in the northern areas of the Gezira region, where a person can spend 10 hours wandering from the east between the village of Laouta and the village of Wadi al-Krail in the west.
As is known in international law (1), the responsibility for the security and safety of the citizens of the Gezira area falls officially and legally on the shoulders of the military force that controls the region and every spot of it with the presence of civilians. It is understood that the Janjaweed militias are the ones who control the Gezira area.
Regarding this law, which the international community deliberately ignores, the Janjaweed claim (for example in the massacre of the village of Wadi al-Noura – about 280 civilians were killed in cold blood; early estimates start at 100+2) either that the citizens were carrying weapons (which of course they had the right to do as long as they kept their village to protect themselves from anyone who might attack them), or that there was a Sudanese military presence in the village. Of course, it is necessarily known in international law that any civilian site can become a military target if it is proven that it contains military forces, provided that all possible measures are taken to limit the harm to civilians.
But the truth that is evident in the videos that are widely circulated on social media (for example, let us take the two incidents of the Wad al-Noura massacre as an example of the Janjaweed and the bombing of the Kandahar market as an example of the Sudanese army, 3), we will notice the following:
1) As an example – in the Wad al-Noura village massacre (although there are many others) we do not see any soldiers belonging to the SAF , whether among the dead, the wounded, or the people present.
This clearly indicates that the SAF soldiers were not present in the area at all.
This also proves that the village is in fact a 100% civilian area. This proves that it is an area in which there are no military forces at all, and therefore targeting it by any military group becomes a mere war crime and a crime against humanity.
2) As for the incident of the airstrike on the Qandahar market (although there were many of them), we not only notice the presence of Janjaweed militia fighters wandering among the dead and wounded carrying their weapons, but we also notice their own militia fighters still wearing their uniforms among the dead and wounded.
This proves that it is indeed a civilian area (a market, even if it is for selling looted goods), but with a heavy presence of military forces, which makes it a military target according to international law, despite all the pain one feels because of the civilian victims (these videos were most likely recorded by the mobile phone cameras of the Janjaweed themselves).
In this regard, the Janjaweed militia bear full responsibility for what happened to civilians and what happened to their fighters, and they use civilians and their presence, such as residential neighborhoods and markets, as human shields behind which they take shelter.
Of course everyone knows that the Janjaweed militias committed to staying away from civilian and residential areas, starting with evacuating citizens’ homes, a commitment they have not adhered to until this moment.

Conclusion
From a tactical standpoint, what is happening in Gezira area is merely a military plan to force the SAF to wage this war in a guerrilla warfare manner in an arena known to be a maze due to the secret irrigation canals and vast plains with dirt roads intersecting vehicles.
To implement this plan and because of the tendency to persecute and abuse civilians that is rooted in the nature of the Janjaweed militias, direct orders were given to war experts hired by the UAE to the Janjaweed militias to commit all kinds of crimes against unarmed civilians in the agricultural plan area of ​ Gezira in central Sudan, regardless of the fact that the merciless Janjaweed militia fighters are accustomed to committing these crimes by nature as they have been doing in Darfur for the past three decades, and although these crimes in Gezira rea are other war crimes, crimes against humanity and a war of genocide, there is a difference in tactics between the two cases in the Darfur case, the Janjaweed militias are committing their above-mentioned crimes in the name of the Islamic regime of the psychological president, the deposed Bashir, to punish civilians who took their revolutionary youth into arms.
But in Gezira rea, the same crimes mentioned above are a tactic yes, but not to punish the poor and helpless civilians, and even worse as a war plan against the Sudanese State, the Sudanese people are militarily represented in the SAF .
Those responsible for these crimes are the Janjaweed militias and their regional sponsor (the UAE) and all the Sudanese political and civil forces and entities allied with the Janjaweed militias and then the international community, headed by the UN and the Security Council as well as the African Union AU and the League of Arab States.

Kampala -10 June 2024