“SUDAN: Bodies in the canals”: CNN investigation reveals Sudanese Armed Forces atrocities against non-Arab civilians
By Human Rights Without Frontiers
HRWF (17.12.2025) – After a one-month long investigation, CNN and Lighthouse Reports have revealed evidence of the Sudanese Armed Forces’ (SAF) systematic targeting of civilians in Gezira state on an ethnic basis. Published in partnership with Sudan War Monitor and Trouw, the report details satellite imagery and whistleblower accounts of bodies in Sudan’s canals.
In early 2025, after more than a year under the occupation of the Rapid Support Forces, the central city of Wad Madani in Gezira state was re-taken by the SAF, who declared a “cleanup operation” of the city and surrounding “rebel pockets.” According to the CNN/Lighthouse report, in reality, the Sudanese Armed Forces and Islamist-backed allied militias including the Sudan Shield Forces used the operation in Madani as a pretext to launch an operation targeting non-Arab civilians across Gezira state. The report explains that attacks on these communities began in October 2024 in the leadup to the campaign to retake Madani and continued for several months after the SAF regained Madani.
Sudanese farmers in Gezira state are known as the Kanabi, a farming community largely of non-Arab, Black Sudanese descent. Much of this community is from Darfur and Kordofan and moved to Gezira state in the 1950s as labourers. They have long been marginalised by the Arab-led state due to their ethnicity and live in villages called kambos. CNN and Lighthouse Reports explain that same ethnic divisions that have plagued Sudan since the state-led Darfur genocide in the early 2000’s have driven the marginalisation of the Kanabi for decades. The SAF is said to have capitalised on these divisions in part to target the Kanabi and drive them from their land.
The joint investigation uncovered extensive evidence of ethnic violence, mass killings, and dumping of bodies into mass graves and canals. The verification of hundreds of video, satellite imagery analysis and exclusive, on-the-ground interviews with SAF whistleblowers and survivors of attacks in different kambos reveals, according to Lighthouse Reports and their partners, a “harrowing picture of a targeted military campaign against civilians, the unleashing of undisciplined SAF-aligned paramilitary groups, and hurried efforts to hide evidence of their crimes”.
SAF and the General Intelligence Service didn’t respond to CNN and Lighthouse Reports questions about their investigation. The Sudan Shield Forces stated that their forces are not targeting civilians based on their ethnicity and that their troops ‘strictly adhere to the rules of their engagement and International Humanitarian Law’.
Lighthouse Reports and CNN say they spoke to several high-level sources who all indicated that the orders for the campaign came from the highest ranks of SAF and influential Islamists who exert pressure on SAF leadership.
The report’s primary sources, which included exclusive interviews with survivors and whistleblowers, informed two databases that CNN and Lighthouse Reports created to organise and store crime base and linkage evidence. The first of their databases contains nearly 600 archived open-source visual materials from social media platforms such as Facebook, Telegram, WhatsApp, and occasionally X, which they made searchable by thumbnail and thematic tags related to the type of atrocity crime.
Their second database contains location, date, and descriptive information on kambo attacks. The authors linked visual evidence with rural geolocations and witness testimonies. This database contains additional references to secondary sources, including satellite imagery, fire data, historical weather data, and shadow analysis, as well as local media, civil society reports, and conflict data from Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) and Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) Project.
Using a three-source standard, the report authors confirmed 59 verified kambo attacks between October 2024 and May 2025. An additional 87 attacks were reported across our collected interview and open sources. They also verified and geolocated over 50 videos documenting SAF presence, attacks against civilians during the police bridge massacre, and attacks on kambos, including arson and mass graves.
CNN and Lighthouse Reports took various measures to protect sources, such as hiding faces, deleting material from hard drives, using encrypted communication (Signal), and storing notes locally rather than in an encrypted Google Drive.
The authors concluded that “in the case of the Kanabi killings, the SAF and their paramilitary and local militia allies capitalised on military operations to retake cities and towns from RSF to clear the land of people who their leadership fundamentally believes does not belong there”.
The report included the story of Miriam (whose name has been changed for her own safety), who described the day the SAF marched through the streets of her central Sudanese home town, in Gezira state, to take it back from the RSF. Miriam was at home with her sons and the army marched onward to Wad Madani but four soldiers came to her house and demanded the men – namely her four sons – come with them. “They said that no one from the Blue Nile region was allowed to stay,” Miriam explained, referring to an area where non-Arab, African tribes live. The report describes how her sons and brother were driven away by motorcycle. Shooting continued throughout the day and houses set alight by the army. She detailed to CNN and Lighthouse Reports how later she would learn at least some of those shots killed her sons and brother. Miriam managed to escape with her other brother, Suleiman.
At least seven other survivors from Gezira State told CNN and Lighthouse Reports similar stories of “merciless targeting of civilians based on their ethnic group and the perception that – despite decades of living in Gezira state as farmers – they were foreigners, from non-Arab regions of Sudan that have long been persecuted by SAF and the former regime”.
One community leader in Gezira state told CNN and Lighthouse Reports about watching SAF soldiers dump three bodies into the canal and later traveled throughout Gezira state, taking account of destroyed kambos, including those that were never occupied by RSF in the first place.
“What is happening now in Gezira,” he said, “is that they [SAF] want to destroy the area[s] where an African majority lives.”
