Frankenstein’s monster has turned on its creator, in the African country of Sudan. Over a decade ago, Sudan’s military created the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a genocidal militia it used to wipe out villages inhabited by some African tribes in Sudan’s Darfur region. Now, this Frankenstein’s monster, the RSF, is beating the Sudan’s military in a civil war, and has taken over Sudan’s capital region, its breadbasket region, and its vast western expanses. The RSF is looting much of the populace, selling the loot at so-called “Dagalo markets.” It is slaughtering males from western Sudan’s black African Masalit tribe. And it is turning some women into sex slaves, while raping others. A Mideast news source reports:
The Sudanese people began 2024 to the sounds of bullets, aerial bombardments, and individual crimes of violence, including hundreds of rapes. The civil war that began in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, led by General Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, has raged across 60% of the country, with the displacement of more than 7 million people. Several displaced citizens spoke of terrible atrocities taking place on the ground….
Yara Hussein was able to escape to the Egyptian-Sudanese border…“I am a mother of four children. I was able to escape with my husband and my children to the border with Egypt through the Argin crossing [in the center of the Egypt-Sudan border], and now we have been there for a week and have not been allowed to enter, but at least we are in a safe area. The escape trip cost me more than $1,000, which is almost all the cash I have, and now I only have gold that I want to sell to save my husband and children.”
Speaking of her escape, she said, “The Rapid Support Forces stormed our area and killed a number of young men inside their homes and in front of their families. Members of these militias also stormed some homes, settled in them, and began eating whatever food was available, even though the people of the house were present.
“A 16-year-old girl was also raped in our area. After they raped her, they killed her because she had beaten someone in retaliation for the rape. They hung her body over her house and wrote that this was the fate of those who faced them.”
Al-Tahir Abdullah, an expatriate Sudanese journalist and activist, launched a Facebook page to raise funds to finance the purchase of abortion and contraceptive pills in Sudan.
“There are many cases of rape being carried out by RSF soldiers. Our people in the areas of Madani, Wad City, and others, during the few times they have access to the internet, talk about major crimes and rapes taking place on a number of girls there, in addition to the killings that take place randomly.”
Abdullah told of his neighbor’s experiences.
“One of our neighbors in the Al-Andalus neighborhood in the city of Wad had two of her daughters raped in front of her. Her husband was killed several months ago in the ongoing war in Sudan, and she was forced to use traditional methods to ensure that her two daughters would not become pregnant as a result of the rape,” he said.
“Now, many Sudanese women in conflict areas are taking birth control pills, the price of which has increased more than 1,000 times, and they are not available. Therefore, we are working to provide them by purchasing them from neighboring countries and smuggling them into Sudan using volunteers. So far, we have been able to collect more than $10,000, which is certainly not enough, but it may solve the crises of some women inside Sudan.”
About the rapes, Jaber said, “Indeed, there are cases of rape. We have received some cases of girls aged 14 to 18 who were raped and lost their virginity, or who became pregnant as a result of the rape. I personally documented more than seven cases of rape, and my colleagues also documented other cases, but these cases were able to reach us.”
Jaber added that there were many rape victims who had not reached them, not to mention victims who were killed.
“We have heard horrific testimonies from the displaced,” he said. “Either the militias killed some of their members, or they were unable to survive.”
Omar Hussein, 57, managed to escape to Egypt several weeks ago and told The Media Line: “The Rapid Support [Forces] militia killed my son Ahmed in front of our house. He was 25 years old. He heard the sound of gunfire outside. He stood at the door to watch what was happening and held his smartphone to film, but they killed him directly, took his phone, and entered our house to threaten us.”
Hussein continued, “They repeatedly entered our house, used our belongings, and even left us all in one room. They used the rest of the house for sleeping and resting, and as a weapons store, but they went out to fight, and I escaped with my family with only some light items. When I arrived at the [Argin] crossing, they did not allow us to enter [Egypt] at first, but I hold a residence visa in a Gulf country, and I told them that I intend to travel there with my family, so they let us enter Egypt.”
Zulkifli, a Sudanese activist, said “I and others manage a group of activists, documenting the crimes of the Rapid Support [Forces] militia in the areas they raid. Now our account has become a source of reliable videos. We used to publish only what we film, but now we receive hundreds of videos daily about the crimes of the Rapid Support [Forces] militia, and we publish them after we verify them.”
Zulkifli said that he receives daily videos “about the killing of citizens, rape, and destruction. Unfortunately, we have a large archive of crimes documented on video.”
He and his team ask followers who send videos to state the region and the date at the beginning of each video, “so that we can verify the video and documentation.”
“The strange thing is that we received videos from some members of the Rapid Support [Forces] militia that they filmed themselves, laughing or threatening while they were killing citizens, and they appear in the video with their faces, and they also talk about the name of the area they stormed and the date, and they brag about their crimes,” he said.
Zulkifli said that in one such video, an RSF member “talked about those who have the right to rape girls because they have become ‘slaves,’ and that murder is the fate of everyone who stands before them.”
Recently, the RSF renewed its bloody mass killings and rapes to drive the Masalit ethnic group from Sudan into the neighboring country of Chad.
The RSF 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.
