The 27 guilty verdicts are the first handed down by The Hague-based court over war crimes in the Sudanese region in the 2000s.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has found a commander of a Sudanese militia guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in leading attacks in the western region of Darfur more than 20 years ago.

Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman, also known as Ali Kushayb, was convicted at The Hague-based court on Monday of multiple war crimes and crimes against humanity – including murder, rape, torture and forcible transfer – committed from August 2003 to March 2004.

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The 27 guilty verdicts for the leader of the government-backed militia known as the Janjaweed were the first ever handed down by ICC judges over atrocities in Sudan’s Darfur region.

“The chamber is convinced that the accused is guilty beyond reasonable doubt of the crimes with which he has been charged,” said Joanna Korner, the ICC presiding judge. “Its verdicts are unanimous.”

Abd-Al-Rahman will face a sentencing hearing at a later date. He is eligible for a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

‘The entire town was on fire’

During the trial, judges heard from 56 prosecution witnesses who described harrowing violence and the use of rape as a weapon of war.

One witness said that during one attack, Abd-Al-Rahman allegedly told his fighters to “repeat” their abuses because “maybe there are some that you have missed.”

Delivering the verdicts, Korner recounted the testimonies from witnesses, who described entire villages being razed by Janjaweed militia forces and women and girls being raped by gangs of fighters in the aftermath.

“The entire town was on fire. … It was beyond words to describe this,” she said, reading the words of one witness. “After the attack, [the village] was a rubble of ashes, … corpses scattered everywhere.”

Abd-Al-Rahman had denied all the charges against him in the trial, which opened in April 2022, insisting the court was prosecuting the wrong man.

“I am not Ali Kushayb. I do not know this person,” he told the court at a hearing in December.

Abd-Al-Rahman fled to the Central African Republic in February 2020 when a new Sudanese government said it would cooperate with the ICC’s investigation. He said he then handed himself in because he was “desperate” and feared authorities would kill him.

Brutal conflict

Abd-Al-Rahman’s crimes were committed during the war that erupted in Sudan in 2003 when he was commanding one of the Arab tribal militias that the central government in Khartoum outsourced to crush an armed campaign by mostly non-Arab armed groups who were rebelling against Darfur’s political and economic marginalisation.

Many of those Arab militias, known as the Janjaweed, were later repackaged into the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, which has been fighting a civil war with the Sudanese army since April 2023.

The United Nations says 300,000 people were killed and 2.5 million displaced in the Darfur conflict in the 2000s.

Sudan’s president at the time, Omar al-Bashir, is wanted by the ICC for crimes including genocide, but he has not been handed over to The Hague.

The verdicts on the decades-old war crimes come as similar atrocities continue to be reported in Sudan today.

In July, the ICC’s deputy prosecutor told the UN that there were “reasonable grounds to believe” that crimes against humanity and war crimes were continuing in Darfur during the ongoing civil war.