“In March, after months of intense fighting, the Sudanese army recaptured the war-torn capital” city of Khartoum “from the warring Rapid Support Forces, who occupied it during the war. The group inflicted widespread abuse and brutality on the tiny population that remained. Now the city is a shell of itself,” reports a news article. “The capital of Sudan was once a bustling, diverse metropolis — one of Africa’s most populous cities, with 6 million people. Skyscrapers towered over a hazy, Saharan landscape.”
But during the city’s occupation by the RSF militia, “Virtually everything of value was stripped from many homes and businesses across the city: from jewelry to water pipes and metal roofs. Electric cables were ripped from the walls and dug from the ground in Aldy’s home and in virtually every occupied building, stripped for copper. Heaps of plastic wiring have been dumped across the city.” Up to one million tons” of copper was “stolen from Khartoum,” says a state official. As a result, much of the city is as dark at night as cities in the Medieval ages.
“Even Sudan’s treasures were pillaged. The national museum in central Khartoum held close to 100,000 artifacts, dating back more than 4,500 years: mummies, sacred instruments and ancient tools from the Islamic, Christian and Meroitic eras of Sudanese history. Most of it was taken — or vandalized. The arms of towering granite statues of Nubian royalty at the entrance to the museum were hacked off.”
The city’s water station, which had lasted for 93 years, was destroyed. “The theft of tons of electric cables has meant power reconstruction will be a huge task.” “Solar is what we’re considering now because it will be very hard to replace all the cables,” an official says. Many buildings are on the verge of collapse. “It will take billions and billions of dollars, no question,” an official says, adding that Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and China have all offered to help rebuild the city.
The public-health infrastructure is also in ruins. All 37 public hospitals in Khartoum were looted and suffered massive damage, as did most of the 60 private health clinics in the city.
Because the capital city of Khartoum is so ruined, Sudan’s officials moved to Port Sudan, which became Sudan’s de facto capital during the civil war. But recently, the RSF militia sent drones to attack Port Sudan, targeting its fuel depots. ” The explosions at the fuel depots have left Port Sudan without the diesel used to power the pumps that bring up the groundwater.”
As a result, people in that very hot city lack water to bathe in, and some even have difficulty buying enough water to drink, resulting in hordes of stinky, thirsty people.
The RSF recently torched part of a huge camp for displaced people, killing hundreds. 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.
This year, the State Department formally declared that the Rapid Support Forces are committing genocide in Sudan.
