Sudan Army Detainee Abuses: Starvation Cells & War Crimes
Behind the Sudanese Armed Forces' (SAF) self-styled role as the "guardian of the state" lies an archipelago of makeshift torture sites, skeletal detainees, and systemic retribution.
The military has spent months peddling a seductive narrative to international monitors: that the army remains the sole institutional bulwark protecting civilians. But behind the closed gates of military intelligence barracks, ad-hoc detention sites in Port Sudan, and newly retaken garrisons, a different reality unfolds.
Sudanese armed forces operating in military-controlled areas.. Source: Human Rights Watch
The physical evidence emerging from these facilities defies justification under any doctrine of military necessity. Detainees emerge—if they emerge at all—wasted to the bone, bearing the unmistakable signs of prolonged caloric starvation and severe muscle atrophy. These are not prisoners of war receiving field rations; they are civilian detainees packed onto bare, broken concrete tiles, submerged in their own waste, deprived of potable water, and subjected to deliberate, grinding emaciation.
How Sudanese Army Detention Centres Allegedly Became Sites of Starvation and Medical Elimination
https://t.co/bN4iw4TWde via @EnImArabic https://t.co/6CscOQtMes
Medical neglect in these cells is not accidental triage—it is punitive policy. Independent documentarians and rights monitors have uncovered instances where infected blast injuries and torture wounds are bound with filthy rags, while improvised IV fluids hang from rusty bars over unconscious men lying on the floor. When an armed force deliberately withholds food and basic antibiotics from captive populations until their organs fail, that is not collateral damage.
Under the Rome Statute and International Humanitarian Law, the weaponization of starvation and the systematic denial of medical care to detainees constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity. A state army that starves detainees in basements possesses no moral superiority over the warlords it fights. Allowing the armed forces to hide their abuses behind a uniform will only ensure that whatever remains of Sudan will be built on the bones of its people.