“Sudanese people are eating leaves and charcoal to survive after fleeing an attack on” Zamzam, the world’s largest camp for internally-displaced people, reports the BBC.
“Some 400,000 people have been forced to flee the largest displacement camp in Sudan’s Darfur region after the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) took control,” reports DW News. “The RSF attack on the camp left hundreds dead or wounded.”
The BBC adds:
“The stories we’ve been hearing are truly horrific,” Noah Taylor, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s head of operations, told the BBC’s Newsday programme.
People are fleeing el-Fasher for Tawila, but are dying “on arrival,” Mr Taylor added.
He said that some were “dying of thirst”, whilst making the 40km (25 mile) journey from Zamzam camp in “blistering” temperatures.
“We’ve heard stories there are still bodies on the road between el-Fasher and Tawila.
“We spoke to a family who told us of a girl who had walked on foot by herself from el-Fasher, was repeatedly raped along the journey, and then died of her wounds when she arrived in Tawila.”
El-Fasher is the last city in Sudan’s western region of Darfur under the control of the army and its allies. Earlier this month, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) attacked the nearby Zamzam camp, forcing tens of thousands to flee their makeshift shelters.
“More than half the people in Sudan, a nation of 50 million people, are suffering from severe hunger,” reports Reuters.
Sudan is in the middle of a bloody civil war. 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 Rapid Support Forces are much worse than Sudan’s military, although both sides are brutal.
In January, 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 “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.”
