Riding horses, camels and motorbikes, the paramilitaries arrived on the outskirts of Ardamata in early November. Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fighters took men from homes that they then burned down; at least 800 people were killed and survivors were ordered to bury the dead.

The RSF went door-to-door in Ardamata, in west Darfur, according to the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, rounding up and killing people from the Masalit ethnic group.

Investigators at the non-profit Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) have collated images from Ardamata that appear to confirm attacks on civilians. CIR’s Sudan Witness project has been monitoring human rights violations in the region, which is closed to foreigners and journalists, using open-source information, satellite imagery and Nasa-provided data, as well as gathering images from social media that are geolocated.

The Masalit have been targeted as supporters of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in the tensions and outbreaks of violence surrounding west Darfur’s capital of El Geneina.

The much-feared RSF, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, has been fighting SAF forces loyal to General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan since 15 April, when the two leaders began a tussle for power that again toppled Sudan into a civil war. The UN says more than 9,000 people have been killed and 5.6 million displaced in the past seven months.

The RSF now holds four of the five Sudanese army bases in the Darfur region and took control of Nyala and Zalingei in October. Fighters have been accused of carrying out an ethnic massacre in El Geneina, where mass graves were identified in July. The town of Ardamata marks a further increase in RSF forces’ control of the region.