The Sudan massacre is the killing of at least 624 civilians by a government-affiliated militia in late October 2025, which John Kiriakou discussed on 31 October after watching the footage on France 24.
What he saw
“The video from Sudan is — it’s just epically brutal,” he said. “Hundreds and hundreds of bodies just laying in the fields or laying in this hospital parking lot.” The militia “attacked civilians day before yesterday, killed at least 624 people just in cold blood. It was a massacre. It’s a crime against humanity is what it is.”[1][2]
Both he and the host acknowledged the coverage gap in their own programme before criticising anyone else’s: the war was “a very underreported story, including by us. We’ve been remiss.”[1]
The structure of the war
Kiriakou reads Sudan as a proxy conflict rather than a domestic one. The Rapid Support Forces — “a breakaway part of the government”, making it “a civil conflict within the government” — are financed by the United Arab Emirates, while the Sudanese government is supported by Saudi Arabia.[3][4]
Asked whether there is a Wahhabi component, he answered by lineage rather than by label: he would personally have called Hassan al-Turabi a Wahhabi, “and the leaders of Sudan today are sort of the ideological descendants of Hassan al-Turabi. So I would say yeah, there probably is.” Turabi, he added, “was a fundamentalist by anybody’s definition of fundamentalism.”[4][5]
The precedent he reaches for
The comparison Kiriakou draws is not to another African war but to the Tajik civil war of the 1990s — another proxy conflict that ran for as long as the outside money did, and stopped when the sponsors lost interest.[2][6][3]