Sudan’s ‘Missing’ public Facebook group, which has thousands of members, has been flooded for weeks now with similar posts: short texts, a photo, and a phone number.
One recent appeal tells of a young man named Ibrahim who two days before Eid al-Adha, which began at the end of June, left home in Sudan’s capital Khartoum to travel to Madani, a city to the south, before vanishing without a trace.
Another post asks about Jihad, a woman who left her home at the beginning of June and is yet to return. A third recounts the case of Sami, a young man from Omdurman, who is last known to have left home in mid-June in a red T-shirt and his bike.
All have another trait in common: loved ones asking for any information that might lead to the whereabouts of their missing friends and relatives.
As the war in Sudan between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) enters its fourth month, the flurry of posts on this and other social media groups reflects the growing number of people who are going missing or being forcibly disappeared by one of the warring parties amid the chaos of the conflict.
“In Khartoum state alone, there have been 451 documented cases of civilians who have been forcibly disappeared since the war began on 15 April. The actual number is feared to be much higher”
Enforced disappearances
In Khartoum state alone, there have been 451 documented cases of civilians who have been forcibly disappeared since the war began on 15 April, said Gillian Kitley, director of the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Sudan. The actual number is feared to be much higher.
Most of those who have been disappeared have been arrested by either the army, and in particular the Military Intelligence, or the RSF, often on suspicion of supporting the other side in the war, said Kitley, whose office works hand in hand with civil society groups.
“Any enforced disappearance is of concern because these are people who, if they have been detained by one of the parties, are being held incommunicado, so the families are not informed of their whereabouts or why they are being held,” Kitley told The New Arab.
“The detention places are also not of public knowledge, so there is no legal oversight over the detention of these people,” she added. RELATED
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Most of those disappeared by the army or Military Intelligence are held in military bases, but also in police stations and military intelligence facilities, Kitley said.
They have been able to document some 130 cases of civilians being held at the Wadi Seidna military airbase, some 20 kilometres north of Khartoum and the site that was used to carry out many of the international evacuations that took place in April and May.
In the case of the RSF, at least six locations are known to be used as informal places of detention in Khartoum state. These include the group’s bases in Kafouri and Sports City, and civilian buildings in the neighbourhoods of Riyadh, Al Nasser, and others in Bahri.
“It’s also very likely that some of those reported disappeared are dead, and the families have no information about the circumstances of their death. And because it is so difficult to collect the bodies of people killed in the conflict, it’s quite likely that families may never know what happened to them,” Kitley said.
“This is obviously a very distressing situation for the families,” she added.
On 25 June, a group of Sudanese lawyers officially brought more than 450 allegations of enforced disappearances before the Chief Public Prosecution of Madani, who recognised his jurisdiction over the cases even though they occurred in Khartoum state, due to the exceptional circumstances of war, Kitley explained.
In addition to the cases of civilians who have been forcibly disappeared, there are also cases of people who have simply gone missing during the conflict, without the motives being immediately clear.
Since the outbreak of war and until mid-June, at least 305 people have been documented missing under these circumstances, according to Fadia Khalaf, co-founder of the Missing Initiative, a local monitoring group. They also believe that the real number is much higher.
Of all the cases of disappearances tracked by the Missing Initiative, the vast majority took place in the city of Khartoum, followed by Omdurman and Bahri. The group has only been able to document over a dozen cases in other cities.
Most of these missing persons are young men aged between 20 and 35, followed by those between 35 and 50, but there are also about 20 minors. Less than 10% are women.
“Most of those who have been disappeared have been arrested by either the army, and in particular the Military Intelligence, or the RSF, often on suspicion of supporting the other side in the war”
They believe that most have been arrested, particularly by the RSF. But the heavy fighting in Khartoum and the indiscriminate nature of many attacks are also killing many civilians whose bodies are piling up unidentified in hospitals, morgues, graves or in the streets.
“In such a situation, [with] the war we are going through and the lack of connectivity, you will never easily know if they are actually missing because something bad happened to them or [because] they have been kidnapped or forcibly disappeared,” Khalaf told TNA.
“Another reason is that some people had issues going from one place to another, from one state to another, or crossing the border, and we don’t know what happened to them,” she added.
In response to the high number of missing persons that have been recorded in Khartoum, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has also set up a hotline for families to report missing relatives.
