“An airstrike on a Baptist church in Sudan less than a week before Christmas killed at least 11 people, including eight children,” in Sudan’s civil war, notes a news article:
The Sudan Armed Forces airstrike hit Al Ezba Baptist Church in Khartoum North on Dec. 20. It damaged the worship facility, the church’s nursery—which was occupied at the time—and several residential buildings…Less than a week after the airstrike on the mosque, more than 100 civilians were killed when the Sudan Armed Forces hit a crowded marketplace in Kabkabiya in western Darfur.
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom reported in April more than 150 churches had been damaged since the war in Sudan began in 2023.
Sudan is an overwhelmingly Muslim nation where most people attend mosques rather than churches. So the 150 churches damaged in the civil war account for much of the churches in the country.
While the Sudan Armed Forces are recklessly indifferent to human life, their adversary in Sudan’s civil war, the Rapid Support Forces militia, is even worse. The RSF has engaged in genocide. It committed mass killings and rapes to drive the Masalit ethnic group from Sudan into the neighboring country of Chad. The RSF slaughtered 1600 people, almost all Masalit, at a single camp for displaced people in Western Sudan. It killed at least 1,000 Masalit in just a single district of El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur state. Countless other Masalit men, women, and children have been murdered by the RSF in other places.
The RSF has disrupted farming activity in areas it controls, by plundering them, and killing some villagers in terror campaigns.
The RSF interfered with harvests in Sudan’s Jazira state, a breadbasket that 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.
The RSF is shelling the biggest refugee camp, Zamzam, where famine was first declared in Sudan. Half of Sudan’s 50 million people are very hungry. In May the Clingendael Institute, a Dutch think-tank, estimated that hunger and related diseases would kill at least 6 million people in Sudan by 2027.
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 fighting Sudan’s military in a civil war, and has taken over much of Sudan.
