“Fighters from Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have torched swathes of the country’s largest refugee camp, firing indiscriminately at civilians,” reports CNN.
Hundreds of refugees appear to have been killed in the attack, which began on February 11. Zamzam camp contains half a million displaced people suffering from famine. Half of Zamzam’s central market was burned in the attacks, reports Yale Humanitarian Research Lab.
Zamzam filled with people fleeing violence in the cities of a war-torn province in Sudan, North Darfur. But since December 1, the Rapid Support Forces have been shelling Zamzam, killing scores of residents.
As CNN explains:
The RSF and its rival, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), have been locked in a brutal civil war since April of 2023. Since then, the RSF has been campaigning to capture al-Fasher —the last remaining SAF stronghold in the region — 15km north of Zamzam…On Tuesday, RSF fighters approached the camp from the east before entering the central market…fighters set several shops ablaze…“I saw people fleeing, and I was among them—some in their private vehicles and others on foot for hundreds of meters. Several stray bullets flew over our heads, and a victim fell right in front of me,” [a resident] recounted.
Dozens of children, women, and elderly people were killed ….the fire ignited on Tuesday, causing damage that HRL says is “consistent with intentional razing” identified after nearby arson attacks perpetrated by the RSF….The attack, which unfolded over two days, was launched weeks after the RSF began targeting the camp with long-range artillery in early December…
Zamzam has long been at the epicenter of the malnutrition crisis in Sudan. Last August, the World Food Program declared that the camp had been pushed into famine. In the weeks before the RSF entered the camp, CNN gathered testimonies from residents and healthcare providers in Zamzam, which paint a stark image: parents going hungry to feed their children and whole families rationing small packets of Plumpy’Nut, a thick, peanut paste made to treat malnourished children….“As the camp is surrounded [by RSF fighters], there is no possibility for the population to flee or for humanitarian aid to enter,” Project Coordinator Marion Ramstein predicts. “People are left with nothing.”
Sudan is in the middle of a bloody civil war in which both sides are brutal toward civilians. 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,” said 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 Rapid Support Forces are much worse than Sudan’s military, but both sides are brutal.
Last month, 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 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.” Moreover, 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.” The 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.”
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.
