Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) killed at least 124 people in a village in Sudan’s Jazira State yesterday. Jazira is Sudan’s breadbasket region, and the atrocities being committed there have driven hundreds of thousands of farmers out of that key farming area. That will exacerbate a famine that researchers predict will kill six to ten million people by 2027.
The massacre may be a revenge killing in response to the surrender of high-ranking RSF officer Abuagla Keikal to Sudan’s army on October 20. Since then, the RSF has stepped up its killing and abduction of civilians, driving thousands more from their homes.
Jazira had already experienced a several-month rampage in which the RSF looted homes, killed many civilians and forced hundreds of thousands to become refugees in neighboring states.
The RSF has seized control of large parts of Sudan in a civil war with Sudan’s army. More than 11 million people have fled their homes in the country as a whole. The civil war began in April 2023.
The Wad Madani Resistance Committee says that “The RSF militia is raiding east, west, and central Jazira, and committing extensive massacres in one village after another.” Photos on social media showed mass graves being dug and scores of bodies wrapped for burial.
“The people of Jazira are facing genocide by the Rapid Support Forces and it is impossible to treat the injured or even evacuate them for treatment. Those who have left on foot have died or are faced with death,” said the Sudanese Doctors Union.
A video on social media shows an RSF soldier lining up men of all ages at gunpoint, using racial epithets, and forcing them to bleat like goats. Another video showed an RSF militia member pulling an elderly man to his feet by his beard.
Sudan’s Combating Violence Against Women Unit says RSF soldiers have raping women in Gezira villages as a tactic to humiliate the men and drive people out of the area.
Sudan’s army is not as violent as the RSF, but, too, is quite bad. It conducts indiscriminate airstrike campaigns that wipe out whole city blocks, while usually failing to push the RSF back. Its indiscriminate airstrikes kill a vastly higher number of civilians than RSF militiamen. The army’s indiscriminate attacks have probably killed tens of thousands of people.
Earlier this month, a charity feeding starving refugees at Sudan’s largest refugee camp, Zamzam, was forced to pull out by fighting, leaving starving children unfed. Most of Sudan’s 50 million people are suffering from severe hunger.
This is a small portion of the suffering being experienced in Sudan, Africa’s third-largest country. As The Economist notes, in Sudan,
famine is consuming much of the country..It is almost certain to be as bad as, or worse than, the one that afflicted Ethiopia in the 1980s [which killed 1.2 million people]. If much more help does not arrive very soon, it may prove the worst anywhere in the world since millions starved to death during China’s Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
In May the Clingendael Institute, a Dutch think-tank, released a report which estimated that hunger and related diseases would kill more than 2 million people in Sudan by the end of the year. Timmo Gaasbeek, the report’s author, has since extended his projections to cover the next two years. In an “optimistic scenario”, in which fighting stops and this year’s harvest, expected in October, is slightly better than the last, he predicts around 6 million “excess deaths” by 2027. In the (more likely) scenario in which fighting continues until early next year, more than 10 million may perish. Although some experts have lower estimates, there is an emerging consensus that without decisive action Sudan faces mass starvation on a scale not seen in decades….At least 245 towns or villages have been burnt. Much of Khartoum, the capital, has been flattened.
Earlier, the water supply for the region containing one of Sudan’s largest cities (Port Sudan) was destroyed, when a dam collapsed, killing hundreds of people.
Sudan’s national museum was looted by the RSF. The museum housed “the world’s largest and most comprehensive Nubian archaeological collection, along with artifacts from other ancient civilizations including the Kingdom of Kush (8th-4th century BCE) and the medieval Kingdom of Alwa. The Nubian collection” included “embalmed mummies dating back to 2,500 BC, making them among the earliest and most important such examples in the world.” The museum also had some Christian relics from Sudan’s pre-Islamic period. Sudan, like Egypt, has pyramids and mummies.
The RSF interfered with harvests in Sudan’s Jazira state, which is “home to one of the largest irrigation systems in the world,” reported CNN. Thousands of farmers fled the RSF into areas controlled by Sudan’s military, leaving fields untended.