This Spring, an Arab militia in Sudan, the RSF, engaged in a series of mass killings and rapes near the provincial capital of El Geneina. The violence drove most of the African Masalit tribe into the neighboring country of Chad. This month, the RSF returned to finish the job, Reuters says:
In early November, fighters led by Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) sought out members of the Masalit community for killing, dozens of survivors told Reuters. The focus: Ardamata, an outlying district in El Geneina, capital of West Darfur state.
RSF forces overpowered a Sudanese army base in Ardamata, using drones to attack the soldiers there, survivors said. Sudanese army commanders abandoned their troops during the fighting…The RSF and its allied Arab militias then intensified their attacks on civilians living in a camp for internally displaced people in Ardamata and in surrounding neighborhoods, launching an assault on many of the tens of thousands of people living there, most from the darker-skinned Masalit tribe.
Dozens of survivors …. described seeing Masalit men rounded up and shot. Some said they saw people being hacked to death with axes and machetes. Hundreds were taken to a soccer field in the area, where two eyewitnesses said they saw people being executed by Arab captors. Bloated corpses lay in the streets of Ardamata for days. Homes were burned and looted, some stripped bare as looters made off with TVs, kitchenware, and even doors and windows.
The attack on Ardamata comes after the RSF, a paramilitary force drawn mainly from Arab tribes, and allied Arab militia forces earlier this year drove hundreds of thousands of El Geneina’s former Masalit majority out of the city. In a campaign that lasted almost two months, Arab forces killed hundreds of residents of El Geneina, most of them members of the Masalit tribe. Many of the survivors fled to Chad.
It’s unclear how many Masalit remain in El Geneina. In 2022, the multiethnic city had a population of 540,000, according to UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency. In the wake of this year’s fighting in Darfur, almost half a million Sudanese refugees now live in camps on the Chad side of the two nations’ border.
Ardamata represented one of the last pockets of the Masalit’s presence in the city…The European Union estimates that more than 1,000 Masalit were killed in Ardamata….the “latest atrocities” in Ardamata were part of “a wider ethnic cleansing campaign conducted by the RSF with the aim to eradicate the non-Arab Masalit community from West Darfur.”….
The bloodletting in Darfur erupted days after war broke out in April in the capital, Khartoum, between Sudan’s regular army and the RSF over a plan to integrate the two forces as the country transitioned to civilian rule. The war has displaced more than 6 million people, including the nearly 500,000 who have crossed into Chad, mostly from West Darfur…West Darfur is the Masalit’s historic homeland. Violence in the region has long been stoked by competition for land and water between non-Arab farming peoples like the Masalit and nomadic Arab herders.
The RSF has gained ground in recent months. After seizing swathes of Khartoum, it has forced retreats by the Sudanese army in parts of the Darfur and Kordofan regions. In late October, the RSF overran army headquarters in Nyala and Zalingei, two of the five state capitals in Darfur.
The RSF also recently slaughtered 1600 people, almost all Masalit, at a camp for displaced people in Western Sudan.
In Sudan, Arab militias such as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are enslaving thousands of black men to be laborers in western Sudan. They are also enslaving lighter-skinned women to be sex slaves, and are abducting women from Sudan’s capital city of Khartoum and rival Arab tribes in north Sudan.
This follows the preference of Arab slave traders in past centuries — to use black men as slave laborers, and lighter-skinned women as sex slaves. Arab slave traders enslaved between 12 million and 15 million Africans. As Wikipedia notes, “between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly 1 million and quite possibly as many as 1.25 million white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast of North Africa.” The Ottoman Turks also preferred lighter-skinned women as sex slaves: “Girl sexual slaves sold in the Ottoman Empire were mainly of three ethnic groups: Circassian, Syrian, and Nubian. Circassian girls were … fair and light-skinned…They were the most expensive, reaching up to 500 Turkish lira and the most popular with the Turks. The next most popular slaves were Syrian girls, with ‘dark eyes and hair’, and light brown skin. Their price could reach to thirty lira….Nubian [black] girls were the cheapest and least popular, fetching up to 20 lira.”
The RSF is composed mostly of Arabs from western Sudan. They are fighting the Sudanese army, which is led by Arabs from the north of Sudan near the Nile River.
