“Ukrainian special services were likely behind a series of drone strikes and a ground operation directed against a Wagner-backed militia near Sudan’s capital,” according to CNN:
The drones attacked the Rapid Support Forces, a militia that controls most of Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, and is engaged in a civil war with Sudan’s military. The Rapid Support Forces have committed genocide in Sudan’s Western Darfur region, slaughtering thousands of ethnic Masalit people in and around the major city of El-Geneina.
CNN reports:
Speaking to CNN, a Ukrainian military source described the operation as the work of a “non-Sudanese military.” Pressed on whether Kyiv was behind the attacks, the source would only say that “Ukrainian special services were likely responsible.”
The operation involved a series of attacks on the paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which is believed to be receiving assistance from Wagner, the Russian mercenary group, in its fight against the Sudanese army for control of the country….Video footage obtained by CNN revealed the hallmarks of Ukrainian-style drone attacks.
Two commercially available drones widely used by Ukrainians were involved in at least eight of the strikes, with Ukrainian text seen on the drone controller. Experts also said the tactics used – namely the pattern of drones swooping directly into their target – were highly unusual in Sudan and the wider African region.
Covert strikes by Ukraine in Sudan would mark a dramatic and provocative expansion of Kyiv’s theater of war against Moscow….Ukraine has not officially claimed responsibility for the attacks, which were captured in the drone footage. After this report was published, Andrii Yusov, representative of the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine, told CNN: “We can neither confirm nor deny this.”
Portions of those videos have been circulating on social media since Thursday….A high-level Sudanese military source said he had “no knowledge of a Ukrainian operation in Sudan” and did not believe it was true.
Multiple US officials appeared unaware of the alleged incident and expressed surprise at the suggestion that the strikes and ground operation may have been conducted by Ukrainian forces.
The videos, which alternate between the pilot’s view, the viewpoint of a drone observing from overhead and the controller itself, show a succession of drone strikes in and around Omdurman, a city across the Nile River from the capital Khartoum which has become a focal point of fighting between the two rival factions.
The RSF began committing genocide again this June. It is engaged in ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s Darfur region, killing non-Arab peoples in Sudan’s Darfur region. It also abducted and killed a provincial governor who was a member of the Masalit ethnic group. 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.
Thousands of corpses have rotted on the streets of Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, and the neighboring big city of Omdurman.
Sudan’s army created the RSF, which later turned on the army. The army created the Janjaweed militias two decades ago to fight insurgents in western Sudan’s Darfur region. They later were organized into the RSF. The RSF and the Janjaweed militias engaged in ethnic cleansing on a vast scale, killing vast numbers of people in Darfur between 2003 and 2020, most of them innocent civilians. The army had difficulty fighting the Darfur insurgents before creating the RSF, because the army itself was composed of many troops from Darfur, who might be reluctant to kill members of their own ethnic groups. The army used its Darfuri troops, who were Muslim, to fight Christian and animist insurgents in south Sudan, which was waging a decades-long fight for independence. (South Sudan became independent in 2011, and promptly was plagued by its own civil war, between the Dinka and the Nuer). So it needed other people, like the RSF, to fight for it in Darfur.
Today, the RSF is fighting Sudan’s army for control of the country, and seems to have taken control of most of the capital.
The RSF has 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.
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.
Bu August, more than 13.6 million children were 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.
