One of Sudan’s two warring factions, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), is engaged in ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s Darfus region, killing non-Arab peoples in Sudan’s Darfur region. It also abducted and killed a provincial governor. Khamis Abakar, the governor of West Darfur, was murdered hours after he accused the RSF of “genocide“, in a June 14 statement to a Saudi news channel.
He was killed in the city of el-Geneina, the capital of West Darfur. “Civilians are being killed randomly and in large numbers,” he said in an interview with Al Hadath TV, pleading with the UN to intervene to protect people in the city. “We haven’t seen the army leave its base to defend people.”
Previously, ethnic cleansing occurred in Darfur between 2003 and 2020, killing up to 400,000 people.
The RSF denied it killed Abakary and blamed the killing on outlaws fighting a “tribal conflict.” The Sudan Conflict Observatory, an independent monitor funded by the United States, said the RSF killed Abakary.
“The entire city is under the RSF and the [Arab] militias cooperate with them. Today, all of el-Geneina is destroyed,” Abakar said in the interview. “There is no protection for us whether from the central government or from the regional government.”
Abakar was from the non-Arab, Masalit tribe. Arab militias and the RSF – a group mostly composed of Arab recruits – have targeted Masalit refugee camps, killed people attempting to escape to neighboring Chad, kidnapped and raped women and systematically killed influential figures in the community, such as tribal leaders and human rights lawyers and monitors. Bodies have lain on the streets for days and at least 15,000 people have died in el-Geneina.
Months of bickering between Sudan’s army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the RSF commander, Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, ended in a civil war between the RSF and the army that began on April 15. Ten days later, they took their armed struggle to West Darfur.
However, the army quickly retreated from Darfur, leaving control in the hands of RSF fighters and allied Arab militias.
“We express our deep concern over these crimes and violations committed by militias against civilians and we demand international protection for the state of West Darfur,” said the Roots Organisation for Human Rights and Monitoring Violations, a local civil society group from West Darfur.
More than 115,000 refugees have escaped from West Darfur to Chad despite the perilous journey, according to the UN.
Arab militias and RSF fighters are guarding all exit points from the city and demanding bribes from families trying to flee.
Ahmad Hagar said on Friday that he paid the equivalent of $500 to militias so that he could escape on May 28 with his wife and five children. He blamed the Sudanese army for failing to intervene to defend the Masalit. “Arab militias cooperate with the RSF and the army is silent,” he said.
The specter of being killed by the RSF drove influential figures such as the Masalit tribal chief, Sultan Sa’at, to flee along with his family. They left shortly after Arab fighters raided his brother’s home and killed him, according to Nahid Hamid, the sultan’s wife. “After his older brother was killed in his home, the sultan and his entire family fled. His children, his brothers and sisters and everybody.”
Several NGOs asked the UN and US to “publicly denounce the RSF’s role for committing atrocities in West Darfur”.
The letter came two days after a comment by Sudan’s UN envoy Volker Perthes enraged the RSF. He said that targeted attacks against civilians based on ethnicity in West Darfur were “allegedly committed by Arab militias and some men in RSF uniform”.
The US State Department said America “condemns in the strongest terms the ongoing human rights violations and abuses and horrific violence in Sudan, especially reports of widespread sexual violence and killings based on ethnicity in West Darfur by the Rapid Support Forces and allied militias.”
Seven weeks into the conflict between the army and the RSF, The U.S. imposed travel and economic sanctions on members of Sudan’s warring factions. By the beginning of June, tens of thousands had already died of starvation, and thousands had already been killed by gunfire and artillery shells. More than 1.6 million people had been driven from their homes to other places within Sudan or across its borders, the United Nations says, with many fleeing to neighboring countries like Egypt, Chad and South Sudan.
More than 13.6 million children are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance in Sudan as fighting has cut off the transportation of food stuffs. Children in orphanages have died in droves as snipers and fighting make it hard for orphanage workers to go to markets to buy food, or even get to work to feed the orphans. In one orphanage in Sudan’s capital, at least 60 infants, toddlers and older children perished while trapped in harrowing conditions as fighting raged outside. Most died from lack of food and from fever. Twenty-six died in two days in late May.
An 85-year-old British citizen was shot by snipers and his wife died of starvation after they were unable to leave Sudan. Faced with starvation and with no water, the man left his wife to seek help. While he was away he was shot three times – in his hand, chest and lower back – by snipers. He survived after being taken to a relative in another part of Khartoum, a big city with more than 5 million people in its metropolitan area. His wife was left to fend for herself and it was impossible for his relatives to reach her in an area surrounded by snipers. As a result she died of starvation.
Hundreds of thousands of Sudanese have fled to neighboring countries in Africa, such as to Egypt, Sudan’s northern neighbor, and to Sudan’s western neighbor Chad, even though Chad is one of the poorest and most backward places on Earth (so backward that countless people die of diarrheal diseases there, and much of the population goes hungry). Countless thousands of people in Sudan’s capital Khartoum, a desert city with over 5 million people in its metro area, have now run out of clean water and food.
