Thousands have died of starvation in the city of El Fasher, the capital of a province in the large African country of Sudan. 63 are known to have starved to death even after managing to reach one of the few operating hospitals in the city. It is being bombarded with artillery shells by the militia that is seeking to take the city from Sudan’s military. “El Fasher has been under siege by the Rapid Support Forces” militia, “who have been in conflict with Sudan’s army since 2023. The death toll is likely an undercount,” a news report says.
The Rapid Support Forces earlier slaughtered thousands of people in one of the world’s largest camps for displaced people, Zamzam. “People told me multiple times that when they were fleeing from Zamzam [displacement camp], armed people would threaten them while they were in flight, saying sure, ‘Flee, go to that place, run here, run there, we will follow you, we will find you’,” said Jocelyn Elizabeth Knight, a Protection Officer for the UN refugee agency, UNHCR,” as quoted in a United Nations report. Many have fled Sudan’s Darfur region, where ethnic groups such as the Masalit have been slaughtered by the RSF, and have fled into the neighboring country of Chad:
More than 873,000 Sudanese refugees have fled Darfur and crossed into Chad, which now hosts the largest number of registered Sudanese refugees since the start of the conflict. One in three people in eastern Chad is now a refugee.
In addition to heavy fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and their former allies-turned opponents – the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitaries – that began in April 2023, civilians now face a fast-spreading and deadly cholera outbreak.
“Cholera has swept across Sudan with all the states reporting outbreaks,” said Dr. Ilham Nour, Senior Emergency Officer with the UN World Health Organization (WHO).
She noted that since last July, nearly 100,000 cases have been reported. The highly contagious disease spreads rapidly in unsanitary conditions. As of early August, 264 cases and 12 deaths have been identified at Dougui refugee settlement in eastern Chad hosting Sudanese arrivals from [Sudan’s western province of] Darfur.
The death toll from the RSF’s attacks on the Zamzam camp for people displaced by Sudan’s civil war continues to rise. Last week, before more deaths were uncovered, the Guardian reported that
More than 1,500 civilians may have been massacred during an attack on Sudan’s largest displacement camp in April, in what would be the second-biggest war crime of the country’s catastrophic conflict.
A Guardian investigation into the 72-hour attack by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on North Darfur’s Zamzam camp, the country’s largest for people displaced by the war, found repeated testimony of mass executions and large-scale abductions. Hundreds of civilians remain unaccounted for.
The magnitude of likely casualties means the assault by the RSF ranks only behind a similar ethnic slaughter in West Darfur two years ago.
The war between the Arab-led RSF and Sudanese military, which broke out in April 2023, has been characterised by repeated atrocities, forcing millions from their homes and causing the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.
By June, a cholera epidemic had struck Sudan’s capital, which was once of Africa’s greatest cities before Sudan’s current civil war. The RSF stole most of the copper wiring in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, and destroyed its energy infrastructure. Because utilities can’t provide power, many residents are using solar panels to power their light bulbs and TVs. In May and June, temperatures typically reach 106 degrees in Khartoum, but there is basically no air conditioning there.
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, many people there ended up thirsty and stinky.
More than 14 million people in Sudan have been driven from their homes by fighting in the civil war, including at least 4 million people who fled into neighboring countries, including two of the world’s most backward countries, South Sudan and Chad, which have recurring civil wars of their own. Sudan is experiencing famine in five locations, such as the Darfur region, where the RSF committed genocide against the Masalit people who predominated in West Darfur state.
“Sudanese people are eating leaves and charcoal to survive after fleeing” an RSF attack on Zamzam, the world’s largest camp for internally-displaced people, the BBC reported earlier this year. “Some 400,000 people have been forced to flee the largest displacement camp in Sudan’s Darfur region after the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces” attacked it, reported DW News.
Sudan is experiencing 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.”
