Fire used as 'weapon of war' in Sudan as entire towns and villages burned to the ground

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Hundreds of towns and villages across Sudan have been burned to the ground, and the fires were likely man-made, satellite images and open-source reporting show — the result of a brutal civil war that has been raging in the northeast African nation for over a year. Bitter fighting between the forces of two rival generals has laid waste to much of the country, thousands have been slaughtered, and 10 million people have been driven from their homes, creating the world’s largest displacement crisis, according to the United Nations migration agency. And as the fighting has spread, homes and aid camps have been burned out by fires that have been started intentionally, experts and analysts say. Sudanese refugees at their makeshift shelters at a relocation camp near Adre, Chad. Over 600,000 new refugees have crossed the border from Darfur into Chad. Dan Kitwood / Getty Images “When we see reports of fighting coinciding with clusters of fires, it indicates that fire may be being used as a weapon of war,” Mark Snoeck, an open source investigator, told NBC News on Monday. More than 50 settlements have burned repeatedly, suggesting “intent” and possible forced displacement, added Snoeck, who along with his colleagues has been tracking the blazes by satellite at the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR), a nonprofit organization dedicated to exposing rights abuses and war crimes. Relying in part on heat-sensing satellites developed by NASA to monitor wildfires around the world, Snoeck and the team of researchers from CIR’s Sudan Witness project have documented more than 235 fires that broke out in towns and villages across the country since the start of the war in April 2023. Combining this with open source reporting — cross checking social media content, maps and other publicly available data — they are able to determine the scope of the destruction across the country, which sits at the crossroads of sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and is home to both African and Arab populations, with Arabic being the most widely spoken language. CIR found much of the violence was taking place in Darfur, Sudan’s westernmost region. The latest data shows the fire events moving closer and into El Fasher, the capital of Sudan’s North Darfur state and home to 1.5 million people, including many who have fled from other embattled parts of the country. It is also the last major city in Darfur where the military has a presence, and has become the focal point of the latest fighting between the war’s combatants. Power struggle The region has become a flashpoint in the war that broke out in April 2023 between the Sudanese military, controlled by the country’s top commander and de facto ruler, Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan, and his former deputy, Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo — a former camel dealer widely known as Hemedti — who leads the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Both men were leaders in a counterinsurgency against an uprising in Sudan’s Darfur region, a conflict that in 2005 saw dictator Omar al-Bashir become the world’s first sitting leader to be indicted by the International Criminal Court on suspicion of genocide. Then they were part of the military establishment that helped oust al-Bashir in 2019 after widespread popular unrest. Two years later, they agreed to rule together in an alliance that saw the military seize power in a coup following the collapse of the Western-backed government of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok in 2021. But the alliance between the two military leaders spectacularly broke down over how to manage the transition to a civilian government, and with neither seemingly willing to cede power to the other, war broke out.