Ali Kushayb: Sudan militia leader convicted of war crimes in Darfur

Ali Kushayb led the Janjaweed, a group whose campaign of terror led to hundreds and thousands of deaths.

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Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman, also known as Ali Kushayb, was one of the leaders of the Janjaweed, a government-backed group that terrorised Darfur, killing hundreds of thousands of people.

Kushayb is the first person to be tried by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for the atrocities in Darfur. He had argued it was a case of mistaken identity.

The conflict lasted from 2003 to 2020 and was one of the world's gravest humanitarian disasters, with allegations of ethnic cleansing and genocide against the region's non-Arabic population.

Five years after the end of that crisis, Darfur is a key battleground in another civil war, this time between Sudan's army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), whose origins lie in the Janjaweed.