SUBSCRIBER+ EXCLUSIVE REPORTING - Afraid to show his face and wedged into an overstuffed refugee camp on Sudan’s border with Chad, a middle-aged man named Ridwan recalled the night last November when militant forces - known interchangeably as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) or the Janjaweed - stormed his village, destroying his home, his car and all his other possessions. Ridwan watched as entire neighborhoods burned, and terrified civilians were slain in the streets before he paid a bribe to flee his homeland of Darfur, in western Sudan, to neighboring Chad.
“This is a purely racial war,” Ridwan told The Cipher Brief. “This is purely based on ethnic identity, on taking our land.”
Ridwan is one of many members of the Masalit ethnic group who shared stories of a terrifying flight from their homes in the Darfur city of El Geneina. They described atrocities committed by the RSF, a group fighting a civil war against the Sudanese military: fighters arriving on horseback or motorcycles, looting and ransacking homes, dragging men away for torture and execution, indiscriminately shooting civilians and burning entire villages to the ground, and rounding up girls and women for rape. A Human Rights Watch report as well as a report released by the United Nations documented similar atrocities.
“They (RSF forces) entered our home, looting, taking everything. They came for me, and (no one) could protect me,” a woman named Ellaweha told The Cipher Brief, her voice trailing off. “They just kept screaming, ‘Where is the men?’ and ‘Where is the money?’”
Darfur has already known a genocide - a campaign against the ethnic Darfuri people that began in 2003, left an estimated 250,000 people dead, and led to charges of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court. Now, amid a growing body of evidence, there are fears that it is happening again.
Juma Shabibu, a Nashville-based survivor of the 2003 genocide who travels frequently to a refugee camp in Chad, said refugees there speak of “selling of our young girls as merchandise,” “rapes of both women and men in the thousands,” and “burning children and the elderly in their houses.”
The testimonies and footage provided to The Cipher Brief bear a chilling resemblance to the Darfur genocide of two decades past. And they have raised a question: Will the U.S. and other Western nations feel compelled to act to stop it?
“When I tell people in the U.S. what is going on in Darfur, they don’t believe it because they think they would have heard of it already,” Tom Prichard, Executive Director of the NGO Sudan Sunrise, told The Cipher Brief. “It would be hard to believe the refugees’ accounts of atrocities - were it not for videos filmed by the RSF laughingly celebrating their atrocities.”
The Rapid Support Forces latest episode of ethnically targeted killings in West Darfur bears the hallmarks of an organized campaign of atrocities,” said Mohamed Osman, Sudan researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The U.N. Security Council needs to stop ignoring the desperate need to protect Darfur civilians.”
For decades, the U.S., along with many European nations and the U.N., have used the phrase “never again” when it comes to crimes against humanity. It was a vow first made after the Nazi extermination of the Jews, and then again decades later when the Khmer Rouge killed millions of people in Cambodia and in Africa following the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and then after the genocide in Darfur.
Now, the term “never” is being tested.
Genocide and War in Sudan: A recent history
Beginning in the early 2000s, then-President of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, began a campaign against the non-Arab, largely black population of Darfur. That campaign led to to the genocide in 2003-2005.
There hasn’t been a true “peace” in Sudan since then, but a fresh conflict erupted last April between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces.
The RSF were formally created in 2015. Its fighters are closely linked to Janjaweed militias who were responsible for much of the genocide. In 2017, Sudan passed a law validating the RSF as an independent security group, and for years, the government used the RSF to “put down Darfurian unrest,” as Prichard said.
But last April, long-simmering tensions between leaders of the RSF and the Sudanese military boiled over into a full-blown war. In less than a year, the war has driven eight million people from their homes, 1.5 million of whom have fled the country, and it has created a humanitarian crisis.
While it’s a conflict with many root causes, many observers have noted that when it comes to the Darfur region, the land there is valuable – rich in gold with modest quantities of chromite, crude petroleum, and petroleum products.
“The (RSF) and their supporters know the region is very rich in natural resources, and this is a golden opportunity,” said Dr. Abdelillah Douda, a Darfuri scholar and education consultant now based in the U.S. “Some Sudanese people call this a War on Gold.”
Shabibu cited other minerals; “Everything you need for an electronic vehicle, all the minerals, are found in El Geneina.”
Will the world respond?
Douda is among many Darfuri exiles who believe that the RSF has been planning to drive out Darfur’s Masalit tribe from their land for years - and that the only way to prevent that from happening is an international intervention.
“The U.S. and the West are drawing a blind eye to the situation in Sudan in general and in Darfur in particular,” Douda told The Cipher Brief. “Ever since the eruption of the war in Sudan, we have been appealing to the international community to step up and stop the atrocities in the region, but unfortunately, their response is very weak…The U.S. and the West are not able to put pressure on the fighting factions to stop the war.”
For decades, American leaders have decried the genocides in Africa - both in Darfur two decades ago, and in Rwanda in 1994 - but they have chosen not to respond with force. As a candidate for president, Barack Obama said that “in a situation like Darfur, I think that the world has self-interest in ensuring that genocide is not taking place on our watch. Not only because of the moral and ethical implications, but also because chaos in Sudan…ends up spilling over into other parts of Africa, which can end up being repositories of terrorist activity.” After leaving office, President Bill Clinton said he regretted not intervening in Rwanda. As a Senator, Joe Biden called for the use of military force in Sudan.
Ultimately, President Bashir was indicted for war crimes - but there was no outside military intervention.
In the current crisis, the Biden administration has imposed sanctions on Sudanese army officials and has levied more limited penalties against the RSF. The U.S. has also repeatedly condemned the atrocities, “especially reports of widespread sexual violence and killings based on ethnicity in West Darfur by the RSF and allied militias,” as the State Department put it last June.
More recently, the U.S. said that “those responsible (for atrocities) must be held to account” and that the warring parties “must silence their guns and find a negotiated exit from the conflict they started.” The U.S. and Saudi Arabia have also brokered peace talks, but those have yet to bear fruit.
But prospects for outside help are hampered by many factors. The ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza mean that global attention - be it at the U.N. or in foreign capitals - is often focused elsewhere. South Africa has been singled out for bringing a genocide case against Israel for its war in Gaza, while saying and doing very little about the horrors taking place on its own continent.
The sheer complexity of the conflict may play a part as well. Those documenting the violence on the ground note that RSF militias aren’t operating in a vacuum. Egypt, and more recently Iran, have sent arms to the Sudanese government forces, and the United Arab Emirates has been accused of sending weapons to the RSF.
“Arab soldiers from Mali, Chad, Niger, Libya and other nations have been told they will be given free land if they come and join the fight,” Prichard said. He added that “Darfur’s more arable and mineral-rich land is an attractive prize” for nomadic Arabs from neighboring Saharan nations and wealthy Arab nations alike.
Finally, there is the difficult fact that the government is now in open conflict with RSF militias - meaning that any outside force would be stepping into a civil war as human rights workers and the U.N. have collected evidence of atrocities committed by both sides.
A recent U.N. report confirmed a spate of recent atrocities in Sudan that included the bombing of houses, markets and bus stations by government forces, and a systematic campaign of rape, looting and killing by the RSF in Darfur.
One video clip included in the U.N. report showed Sudanese government soldiers parading in the streets of El-Obeid, in central Sudan, carrying the heads of students who were killed because of their ethnicity. A U.N. spokesman said the students had been killed because they were believed to support the RSF.
Sudan’s military called the video “shocking” and said it would investigate the allegations and bring any perpetrators to justice. The U.S. has acknowledged that blame for the violence is shared. “While the atrocities taking place in Darfur are primarily attributable to the RSF and affiliated militia, both sides have been responsible for abuses,” the State Department said recently. “Both sides must cease fighting in the (Darfur) area, control their forces, and hold accountable those responsible for violence or abuses, and enable the delivery of desperately needed humanitarian assistance.”
Stuck in a humanitarian nightmare
While the two sides do battle, and the outside world considers - or avoids - a response, nightmares continue for civilians.
The World Health Organization says roughly 80 percent of hospitals in conflict-affected areas have closed. Meanwhile, warring parties are attacking aid convoys. Last week, the State Department condemned a decision by the Sudanese military to prohibit relief aid from crossing into RSF-controlled territory from Chad, as well as the RSF’s looting of aid deliveries and harassment of humanitarian workers. These and other reports led the U.N.’s top human rights official, Volker Turk, to declare that there is “no end in sight” to the abuse of civilians in Sudan.
Ultimately, most observers agree that what Sudan needs - beyond immediate humanitarian help, and short of a military intervention - is a political path to peace.
Joseph Siegle, Director of Research for the Africa Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, told The Cipher Brief it was critical that Sudanese civilian leaders play a more central role “in any negotiation to establish a civilian, democratic government” if the country is to have a chance at “convincing international partners to provide the sustained assistance that Sudan will need to rebuild.”
Siegle also said that given the refugee crisis and “the level of polarization” in the country, a joint U.N.-African Union peacekeeping operation may be needed “to restore stability, oversee a disarmament process, manage the reintegration and reform of the armed forces, and facilitate a transition to a legitimate civilian authority.”
For now, the war rages. One top Sudanese military commander said that while the military “carries an olive branch next to the gun,” it would not engage in political talks until the adversaries lay down their arms. “We will fight, we will fight, we will fight.”
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