ICC to wrap up war crimes trial of feared Sudan militia chief

Abd-Al-Rahman faces multiple charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. [Koen van Weel, AFP]

The war crimes trial of a feared Sudanese militia chief accused of rape, murder, and torture across the Darfur region of Sudan during the country's brutal civil war wraps up this week.

The International Criminal Court will hear three days of closing arguments from Wednesday in the case of Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman, also known by the nom de guerre Ali Kushayb.

A leader of Sudan's infamous Janjaweed militia, Abd-Al-Rahman faces 31 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Prosecutors have accused Abd-Al-Rahman, an ally of deposed Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir, of being an "energetic perpetrator" of murders in the Darfur war in 2003-04.

Described as the "colonel of colonels", he is suspected of being responsible for brutal attacks on villages in the Wadi Salih area of Darfur in August 2003.

"Civilians were attacked, raped and murdered, their homes and villages were destroyed, thousands were forcibly displaced," the ICC prosecutor at the time, Fatou Bensouda, told the court during the trial.

"Men were loaded onto vehicles, taken a short distance away and executed in cold blood. Mr Abd-Al-Rahman was present at and directly participated in these callous crimes," she charged.

Current ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan said that Abd-Al-Rahman and his forces "rampaged across different parts of Darfur".

Abd-Al-Rahman, born in 1949, has denied all the charges.

Fighting broke out in Darfur when non-Arab tribes, complaining of systematic discrimination, took up arms against Bashir's Arab-dominated government.

Khartoum responded by unleashing the Janjaweed, a force drawn from among the region's nomadic tribes.