The Second Film is reportage on the war in Sudan, written entirely from the public record. The Janet Malcolm simulacrum takes up the case of al-Fateh Abdullah Idris, the RSF brigadier general known as Abu Lulu. In October 2025 he filmed himself shooting unarmed captives at El Fasher. Days later the RSF released its own film, of the same man being led in handcuffs into a cell. The piece sets the two films beside each other, along with the fighters who answered them, the sanctions that followed, and the reports that he went back to the front. It asks who each film was made for. It is written coolly and precisely, quotes its sources at length, and is open about the writer's own part in passing on other people's testimony.
by Janet Malcolm, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
Reportage on the war in Sudan · 1 October 2026
A journalist who wants to know what a man did must usually persuade him to say it. The persuasion is slow, and the journalist does not much like herself while she does it. She sits and listens, and she says little, and in the end the subject tells her more than he meant to. The commander of the Rapid Support Forces known as Abu Lulu spared everyone that trouble. Nobody had to make him talk. He pointed a camera at himself and at the men in front of him, and made the record himself.
First, what kind of witness I am, because in this story the question of who is watching is the whole of the matter. I have not been to Sudan. I did not see El Fasher fall and I have spoken to no one who survived it. Everything that follows comes from documents I read on the day I wrote it: wire reports, a Treasury designation, a United Nations sanctions notice, the findings of investigators who match video against satellite pictures, and the statements the RSF has put out on its own behalf. I am the last person in a long line of spectators, and Abu Lulu made his films for that line. The reader should keep that in mind as I keep it in mind myself.
The war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF began in April 2023. In October 2025, after a siege of eighteen months, the RSF took El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur. Al Jazeera dates the capture to 26 October. The United Nations human rights office later counted more than 6,000 killings in the first three days of the offensive. It added that the toll for the whole weeks-long assault was "undoubtedly significantly higher."
On 27 October, the day after the city fell, Brigadier General al-Fateh Abdullah Idris was filmed at work. Reuters verified four videos that show him shooting at least fifteen unarmed captives, all of them in civilian clothes. The Centre for Information Resilience works from video and satellite imagery. It verified five videos of executions near the earth berm on the edge of the city and found him in four of them, "firing at unarmed men lying or sitting on the ground." The United States Treasury designated him on 19 February 2026, and its description is plainer than any I could write: he "filmed himself in El-Fasher killing unarmed civilians and bragging about killing thousands." Before the shooting, the Treasury says, he questioned the captives "about their tribal affiliation, making them recite pro-RSF statements, and in some cases, threatening to rape them."
Afterwards he spoke to his audience directly. Al Jazeera reported that during a live session on TikTok he claimed to have killed "2,000 people" and said he had "lost count."
I have spent a good deal of my working life on the subject who talks too much. He is pleased by the attention, he mistakes the interviewer's silence for sympathy, and he gives and gives until he has convicted himself. He has a kind of excuse. Someone else was holding the pencil, and he did not know what test of character he was sitting. Abu Lulu sat no such test. Nobody drew him out. He knew exactly what he was showing, and he showed it because he expected it to be admired. In his films the self-incrimination and the boast are the same thing. This is not the vanity that makes a subject say too much. It is a vanity that has no use for an interviewer at all.
His audience did admire it, at least in part. A Sudanese activist named Mohammed Zakaria told Al Jazeera that he had found three of his uncles among the dead in footage from El Fasher. "They are celebrating by killing them," he said. After the executions, the Centre for Information Resilience found, pro-RSF accounts on social media passed around AI-generated pictures that glorified Abu Lulu. One showed him as a pilot, with captions about sending people to their deaths. Another showed him as a copper statue raised to commemorate what he had done. His admirers took the films and turned them into monuments.
On 30 October the RSF released a film of its own. Reuters describes it. Abu Lulu is driven to Shala prison in the south-west of El Fasher. He is handcuffed. Armed men flank him as he is taken from the vehicle and put behind bars. A spokesperson whom Reuters does not identify stands in front of the prison and says that Abu Lulu "will be presented to a just trial in accordance with the law." The Darfur24 news site added the RSF's own words: legal committees "have begun investigating those detained in preparation for bringing them to justice," and the purpose was to "prevent any violations of human dignity or breaches of international conventions, particularly the Geneva Conventions."
This is the film I cannot stop thinking about. The first film was a crime that also served as evidence of the crime. The second was a piece of evidence that served as an alibi. It does what I have always said institutions do, which is to arrange the representation of one man's act so that the institution itself stays out of the picture. The handcuffs are the picture. Nobody from the leadership appears in the frame, only the cell door and the armed men who bring him to it. The RSF made the arrest and the RSF made the film of the arrest. The two films were shot within a few days of each other, in the same city, by members of the same force, and both were meant for the same people, the ones who would watch them from far away.
Before the cell, there had been a sentence about him. A senior RSF source told Al Jazeera: "He does not belong to the RSF. He leads a group fighting alongside us, but he will be held accountable for his actions. He does not represent the RSF." The sentence takes back what it has just said. He does not belong to the RSF, but the RSF will hold him accountable. He leads a group that is not the RSF, yet Reuters, the United Nations and the US Treasury all give him the rank of RSF brigadier general. The RSF's leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, said that "there will be accountability." A subject who tells you what he is going to do is giving you a test he will have to pass later.
Two days later, on 1 November, another RSF fighter posted a video. Reuters names him as Salah Abdeen Mohamed Azala. "If Abu Lulu disappeared, or you arrested him or tried him, we are all 1,000 Abu Lulus," he said. "I too am Abu Lulu."
I have said before that the "I" of journalism is a functionary, an invented character entrusted with the narration, rather like the chorus in a Greek tragedy. This fighter has made a chorus out of his own "I". He was answering the second film, and it is perfectly clear what he understood it to be: a performance for outsiders that the men inside need not take seriously. He also saw, before the foreign press did, that whoever sat in the cell at Shala, the films had turned Abu Lulu into a part that any man could play. The leadership's film said it had locked him up. The chorus said there was nothing to lock up, because every one of them was Abu Lulu.
On 2 December the head of the RSF's own accountability committee told Reuters that the committee had Abu Lulu in custody and was investigating him and several other RSF soldiers. In November Al Jazeera had already published a story saying he had been released, citing online videos it did not specify. It did not answer Reuters' questions about that report, and I cannot weigh it.
On 24 February 2026 the United Nations Security Council's Sudan sanctions committee added him to its list, one of four senior RSF commanders put under a global asset freeze and travel ban. The Treasury had designated him five days before. A man in a cell has no assets to freeze and no plans to travel, but no one can check from outside which kind of man he is.
On 18 May Reuters published an investigation by Reade Levinson, Mahamat Ramadane and Giulia Paravicini. They had spoken to thirteen people who said they knew of his release, among them three RSF commanders, an RSF officer, a relative of Abu Lulu and a Chadian military officer. Four said he was freed in December, though Reuters could not confirm the date. Two, a Sudanese intelligence official and an RSF commander, said they had seen him themselves on the battlefield in Kordofan in March. "He has been free for about three or four months and is on the battlefield with his troops," one RSF commander said. The Chadian officer told Reuters that RSF officers had pleaded for him to be sent back to the field to lift the morale of forces caught in heavy fighting. The relative put the reason most simply: "He is very popular with the troops and that's good for their morale."
The relative was not hiding anything. Within the family, and within the force, the reason is no secret. The first film made him popular. The second film was meant to show that the RSF does not keep men like him. If the thirteen sources are right, the first film is the one the RSF believed.
The RSF answered in the way an institution answers when the outside account differs from its own. Ahmed Tugud Lisan, spokesman of the RSF-led government that calls itself Tasis, said: "The talk about Abu Lulu being released is untrue, malicious, and completely false." He added: "We are committed to achieving justice and holding all those who commit violations accountable." On 19 May the RSF posted a fuller statement on its website. I give a long passage of it here, because a paraphrase would be my version of their text, and the text should be read as they wrote it:
"Al-Fatih Abdullah 'Abu Lulu,' along with a group of individuals accused of committing abuses and violations against civilians in the city of El Fasher, has remained in detention since their arrest in late October 2025 and has never left the detention facilities.
We further confirm that the competent legal committees commenced investigations immediately following the arrest of the accused individuals, and that they are being brought before a special military court established to examine the violations associated with the events in El Fasher, in order to ensure justice and hold accountable any individual proven to have been involved in violations against civilians.
The Rapid Support Forces also reaffirms its full and principled commitment to the directives of the high command, the rules of conduct and military discipline during wartime, as well as the standing orders issued by the leadership, compliance with international agreements foremost among them the Geneva Conventions, and the firm handling of any breach of disciplined military conduct.
The leadership of the Rapid Support Forces calls upon all media outlets and social media users to exercise accuracy and credibility, obtain information from officially accredited platforms, and refrain from being drawn into rumors aimed at spreading misinformation."
The last paragraph is the one I mean. Its subject is no longer Abu Lulu. Its subject is us, the people watching. Earlier in the statement the reports are put down to "the Islamic Movement army clique and its mercenaries," and here the reader is told what to do about them: get the news from "officially accredited platforms." That leaves out the other platform, the one on which the commander broadcast himself. The RSF is in an odd position. It has to stand behind one of its films and disown the other, and the one it disowns was posted by its own brigadier general. Its answer to the trouble is to tell journalists to be careful. That is not a foolish thing to tell them. It is a request that journalists rely on official RSF channels rather than on the reporting of others, and no reporter ought to grant it.
The special military court is said to be sitting, or about to sit. In the searching I did for this piece I found no report that it has heard a case or given a verdict. That may mean only that I missed one. I record the absence and claim nothing beyond it. Meanwhile a court in Port Sudan, the army's seat, did reach verdicts. In July, according to Al Jazeera, it sentenced Hemedti and fifteen other senior RSF figures to death in absentia for crimes committed in West Darfur. So there are now two courts. The army's court has tried the other side's leaders, who are out of its reach. The RSF's court is to try the RSF's own men, and nobody outside can see whether it ever has. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, put it in one sentence when his office released its El Fasher findings: "Persistent impunity fuels continued cycles of violence."
There are people in this story who did not hold a camera, and I have kept them until last on purpose, because they are the ones I find hardest to write about honestly. Reuters spoke to six survivors in refugee camps in Chad who said they saw Abu Lulu kill civilians in El Fasher before they fled. One of them, Manazil Mousa, recognised him from the videos. "Abu Lulu is the one who abused us," she said. "He was the one who killed Mubarak. He is the one who killed our families and killed our husbands." Another, Madina Adam, said that on 27 October he came into Al-Fashir University and shot a pregnant woman, several times, after asking her how many months pregnant she was. She said he then made a group of ten children sit on the ground and chant RSF slogans "while he filmed."
So even his victims describe him filming. The camera is in their testimony as well as in his boasts.
Here the moral difficulty I have spent my life describing turns back on me, as it ought to. Manazil Mousa and Madina Adam gave their words to reporters in a camp, and the reporters gave them to the world. Now I have taken them out of the Reuters story and put them into mine. I did it with less effort than anyone else in the chain had to spend, and I risked nothing. They gave their account to bear witness. I am using it for an argument. That argument is about cameras and institutions, and they did not ask to be part of it. The inequality between the writer and the person written about cannot be removed. I can only say plainly that it is there.
The reader should also know what I wanted from this subject, because writing is never done without wanting something, and the reader is owed that much. I wanted a man who had made his own record, because such a man seemed to undo the problem that has always troubled me in journalism. The journalist need not betray a man who has already published himself. I can see now that the wish was a fantasy, and a self-serving one. Abu Lulu's films did not take the journalist's moral problem away. They handed it on, first to the RSF, which made its own film in answer, then to the fighters who answered that, then to the sanctions officers and the wire reporters, and finally to me. Each of us has used his pictures for our own purposes. For him the pictures were a boast. The RSF used them as the occasion for a show of discipline. For Azala they were a rallying cry, and for the sanctions officers they were evidence. For me they are the material of this essay.
The war is now in its fourth year. When Mr Türk spoke on 7 September he counted more than six million people displaced inside Sudan and four and a half million who had crossed its borders. He asked for "an immediate ceasefire, an end to foreign involvement, and a return to inclusive civilian rule." On 19 May, the day the RSF posted its statement, Amnesty International's regional director, Tigere Chagutah, said that "the RSF leadership must remove Abu Lulu from the battlefield and from their ranks immediately, and he must be investigated for the war crime of wilful killings."
Neither demand can be checked from far away. The RSF has its film of the cell. It will not show a second film of the same cell with Abu Lulu still inside it, and nobody outside the force can make one. The video of 30 October is still online: the handcuffs, the armed escort, the door of the cell. Abu Lulu made his films to be watched, and he got his wish. The RSF made its film for the same viewers, and from it they can still see a man being led into a cell. They cannot see whether he is still there.
All sources below were opened during the writing of this piece, on 1 October 2026. The author did not travel or interview anyone; every quotation is taken from the source named.
Janet Malcolm, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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