Beirut, Lebanon –  In the early morning of January 10, Majd Montesser* woke up to what he described as Sudanese army forces raiding his village Taiba in Gezira state and lighting homes on fire.

As residents fled and screamed, army Land Cruisers weaved around the tented huts to shoot and kill young men and the elderly.

Most victims were hit with machinegun rounds to the head and chest while others burned to death, according to several photos that Montesser shared with Al Jazeera. The graphic photos could not be verified because most were taken down from social media for violating publishing standards. Yet, they appear to collaborate the testimonies of witnesses and local monitors

Montesser’s said his elderly uncle was one of 17 people killed.

“They killed 13 people in their homes and four people who were fleeing. They made it about half a kilometre (0.3 miles) before they were shot,” Montesser told Al Jazeera.

“They were all killed in such a savage way.”

Since April 2023, the army has fought the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in a devastating civil war that has killed tens of thousands of people and uprooted some 12 million civilians from their homes.

On January 12, the army’s recapture of Wad Madani, the capital of Gezira state, finally gave civilians some hope that peace and stability would return to the area.

For more than a year, civilians in Gezira had lived under the RSF’s brutal rule.

Civilians and rights groups have accused the RSF of frequently carrying out extrajudicial killings and acts of sexual violence, prompting many to welcome the army as “liberators” when they entered Wad Madani.

However, reports soon emerged that army units were carrying out ethnic killings across the state.

The RSF has typically recruited fighters from its core tribal base in western Sudan, and the army has regularly treated civilians from these regions as RSF collaborators or sympathisers, say local monitors and rights groups.

The army’s ethnic profiling has led to a new cycle of mass killing across Gezira and the expulsion of vulnerable communities from their villages.

Al Jazeera’s authentication agency, Sanad, verified four graphic videos which show men in army camouflage either celebrating the killing of dozens of young men in civilian clothes or abusing civilians.

Two of the videos appear to capture the same incident: Soldiers standing over dozens of bodies in blood-soaked clothes, none of whom appear to be combatants.

Al Jazeera could not verify the identity of the victims in the videos nor the total number of people who have died in the recent spate of ethnic killings. Yet, local monitors believe that dozens – perhaps hundreds – have been executed so far.

“The crimes happening right now are really dangerous. It’s mass killing and ethnic cleansing,” said Jafar Mohammedin, a local activist who fled the country three months ago.

The RSF emerged from the tribal “Arab” militias that the army mobilised to crush mainly “non-Arab” armed groups in a war that devoured Darfur in 2003.

The non-Arab rebels were rebelling against their people’s economic and political marginalisation, while the Arab militias committed a number of massacres to crush the uprising, drawing widespread accusations of genocide until the war officially ended in 2020, according to several reports from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, as well as Sudan scholars.

“Arab” and “non-Arab” are loose categories in rural Sudan as the former mainly refers to nomadic and pastoralist tribes while the latter refers to sedentary farmers.

Both are black and Muslim and have intermarried for centuries.

According to the United Nations, during the army’s drive to recapture Wad Madani, it reportedly attacked residents of the Kanabi, which are segregated encampments in Gezira.

Those living in the Kanabi are mainly non-Arabs from Darfur, the Nuba mountains and what is now South Sudan.

These regions were traditionally denied economic opportunities due to state neglect, systematic discrimination and war, according to Suliman Baldo, the founder of the Sudan Transparency and Policy Tracker, a local think tank.

He noted that for more than a century, young men and women were exploited from these regions to pick cotton and grow crops in Gezira, one of the largest irrigation schemes in the world.

Young men from South Sudan came to search for work in Gezira even after the region split from Sudan to become its own country in 2011.

“The Gezira (irrigation) scheme is a large mechanised farm that needs an abundance of life of manual labour and for more than 100 years there have been migrant workers from West Sudan and the Nuba mountains brought in to work,” explained Baldo

The army has increasingly relied on a number of militias to spearhead its advances in recent months.

Two of them, the Sudan Shield Forces and al-Baraa bin Malik Battalion, led the extrajudicial killings against unarmed men, local monitors told Al Jazeera.

The Shield Forces are headed by Abuagla Keikal, a former RSF commander who defected to the army in October.

While with the RSF, he is accused of overseeing abuses such as kidnappings for ransom, mass looting, the deliberate killing of farmers and rape, according to local monitors and news reports.

“Keikal has a militia from eastern Gezira and they committed some violations against civilians when he was with the RSF and now he is doing it again as part of the army,” said Mohamed Ahmed*, a local monitor whose brother was detained from one of the Kanabi encampments the army attacked.

Al Jazeera contacted army spokesperson Nabil Abdullah to ask why the army had pardoned Keikal and brought him and his forces into their ranks despite being implicated in grave abuses with the RSF, as well as to offer a chance to respond to the allegations against the military.

Abdullah did not respond before publication.

Al-Baraa bin Malik – a militia tied to Sudan’s Islamic movement, which was the main part of former President Omar al-Bashir’s state apparatus for 30 years – has also committed some of the worst abuses so far, according to local monitors and videos that various news agencies have verified, including Al Jazeera’s own Sanad verification unit.

In one video, which was verified by the Center for Information Resilience (CIR), an independent organisation that conducts open-source investigations to uncover human rights abuses worldwide, fighters wearing the insignia of al-Baraa bin Malik and other army units tie a rope around a man’s mouth and push him off the Hantoub bridge in Gezira.

They then spray his body with machinegun fire after he falls into the water.

“These are very disturbing developments, but it only reminds us of the nature of the army,” said Baldo.

“The army has to do some soul-searching in regards to its own history of killing civilians, which continues now,” he told Al Jazeera.

On January 15, army leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan announced a probe into the alleged abuses committed by his forces in Gezira state.

The Sudanese army also released a statement addressing the allegations of reprisal killings in Gezira.

“The Armed Forces condemn the individual violations that recently took place in some areas in Gezira state following the cleansing (of the RSF) of Wad Madani,” the statement read.

“At the same time, the army affirms its strict adherence to international law and its keenness to hold accountable anyone involved in any violations that affect anyone in the Kanabi area,” the statement added.

Dalia Abdelmonem, a Sudanese political commentator and former journalist, told Al Jazeera the army’s statement ticked all the boxes in terms of promising to bring about accountability for the abuses in Wad Madani. Yet, it must behave better for the sake of securing international support to defeat the RSF.

“This is a perfect opportunity for the army to show it is a bonified army and it will only target the RSF (moving forward) and not civilians and that it will no longer abuse, torture or commit summary executions, said Abdelmonem.

“It has to say, ‘We will put a stop to all of that,’” she told Al Jazeera.

Since the war, the RSF has demonstrated little ability to govern territories under its control, with fighters often looting, kidnapping for ransom and generating chaos, according to a recent report by International Crisis Group, a think tank based in Brussels, Belgium.

Many Sudanese, therefore, view the RSF as an existential threat to the state despite their acute concerns and traditional opposition towards the army, which stems from its poor human rights record and refusal to fully surrender power to a civilian authority after al-Bashir was toppled by a popular uprising in 2019.

While the army has regained popularity during the war, Baldo is not optimistic that an investigation will lead to accountability for atrocities committed in Wad Madani since human rights violations are a systemic issue in the army.

He referenced the beheading in February and said the army promised to investigate that incident, but nobody was held accountable.

“If (I see) the commanders who oversaw the killings (of civilians) in the Kanabi held to account, then I will believe (an investigation) happened. I’ll believe it if I see the results,” he told Al Jazeera.

The army’s killing of South Sudanese migrant workers in the Kanabi encampments has also prompted riots and attacks on Sudanese nationals in South Sudan, leading to a diplomatic crisis.

At least 16 Sudanese nationals have died in South Sudan so far in reprisal attacks. Despite the atrocities and other human rights abuses committed by the army, many civilians rely on it to beat back the RSF, which has committed even more abuses, according to rights groups and UN experts.

Earlier this month, the US determined the RSF had committed genocide against the non-Arab Masalit tribe in West Darfur.

Now, the RSF appears to be mobilising a counter-offensive from northern Gezira state, where they have killed dozens of civilians in recent days, according to local monitors and activists.

In al-Hasahisa, a village about 55 kilometres (34 miles) from Wad Madani on the road north to Khartoum, the RSF has mobilised dozens of fighters to prepare for a battle against the army, according to Ahmed Yasser, an activist with the al-Hasahisa resistance committee, a local neighbourhood group advocating for the rights and protections of civilians.

Based on information he received from a network of activists in the area, Yasser said the RSF has killed at least 40 people in the village and confiscated Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet services, which allows civilians to access the internet when network service is not available, to prevent civilians from speaking out about the ongoing abuses.

He added that some activists still have secret access to Starlink and are relaying information to their peers abroad, including to him.

“I have not been able to reach my family, and I do not know if they are alive or dead,” Yasser told Al Jazeera, from Cairo, Egypt, where he now lives.

“The (RSF) have kidnapped entire families and are now demanding ransoms,” he added.

Yasser acknowledged that the army is continuing to go after perceived RSF sympathisers in Wad Madani and not moving north to fight the RSF and protect besieged civilians.

“Some people are wondering why the army is not moving a finger (to head up north),” he told Al Jazeera.

“The army does not care about protecting civilians,” he added. “There are many events before today which indicate that.”