
Sudan is in the middle of a bloody civil war in which both sides are brutal toward civilians, killing large numbers of them. On one side is a genocidal militia — the Rapid Support Forces. “The RSF and allied militias have systematically murdered men and boys — even infants — on an ethnic basis, and deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence,” says the U.S. State Department. On the other side is Sudan’s military, which has used chemical weapons, and tactics that include “indiscriminate bombing of civilian infrastructure, attacks on schools, markets, and hospitals, and extrajudicial executions,” according to the U.S. Treasury Department.
The Washington Post reports on mass killings by Sudan’s military after retaking the one of Sudan’s major cities, Wad Madani:
A group of soldiers forces a rope into a man’s mouth, then throws him off a bridge and shoots at him in the water. Dozens of young men, all dead, lay shoeless in jumbled piles. A soldier leans over a bound and writhing captive, sawing at his neck with a blade until his screams fall silent. These and other terrifying scenes of retaliatory violence captured on video and verified by The Washington Post reveal what happened last week after Sudan’s military recaptured the southern city of Wad Madani, which had been under the control of the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary for a year….
Sudanese media…said many of the victims were migrant workers known as “kanabi,” after the Arabic word for camps. Many kanabi come from neighboring South Sudan — which declared independence from Sudan in 2011 after decades of civil war — or migrated generations earlier from the western region of Darfur….
The violence around Wad Madani has sparked retaliatory attacks against Sudanese refugees in South Sudan. A resident in the capital, Juba, reported riots and machete.wielding mobs hunting Sudanese refugees Thursday. A Sudanese refugee in the town of Wau said that anyone who looked Arab was attacked in the market and that shops were ransacked. South Sudan’s president has called for calm, and police have imposed a nationwide dawn-to-dusk curfew.
Two weeks ago, the State Department formally declared that the Rapid Support Forces are committing genocide in Sudan, more than a year after the genocide began. As we noted in May 2023, “militias aligned with the RSF…referred to locally as the Janjaweed, or ‘devils on horseback’ — were carrying out ethnic killings and have also looted and burned the palace of the sultan of the Masalit tribe. The Janjaweed are ethnically Arab militias; the Masalit are a local African tribe.”
As we noted in June 2023, “One of Sudan’s two warring factions, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), 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. 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 July 2023, we noted that 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.”
In November 2023, we noted that the RSF had slaughtered 1600 Masalit people at a single camp for displaced people, that it had killed at least 1,000 Masalit in just a single district of El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur state, and that earlier in 2023, “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.”
The RSF has shelled 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.