As recently as a few months ago, a typical meal for residents of el-Fasher in North Darfur, Sudan, often consisted of ombaz—crushed peanut shells left over from the making of oil that are usually treated as waste and given to animals. Now, well into the third year of a war that has caused what the United Nations calls the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, even this residue has run out.
Over the weekend of October 25, the paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) took over the city of el-Fasher, consolidating its control over Darfur. Civilians, medical and humanitarian workers, and hospital patients have all been slaughtered with impunity. On November 3, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification reported that famine in Sudan has now taken hold in el-Fasher.
Prior to its capture by the RSF, life in el-Fasher had already ground to a halt after more than a year of continual bombardment and famine. Residents were unable to afford staple items like milk and sugar, which had skyrocketed in cost; local traders who attempted to smuggle food into el-Fasher were routinely killed by RSF forces. Humanitarian aid trucks had been bombed, as well. “Nothing can come in, nothing can get out,” Gaffar Saeneen, a human rights activist from East Darfur who is now based in France, tells The Progressive.
Estimates of casualties since April 2023 have been inconclusive. Violent conflict between the RSF and Sudan’s official military, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), has killed anywhere between 20,000 to 150,000 people since the start of the war—a number that international humanitarian observers cannot verify in the absence of data gathering by Sudanese officials. The United Nations estimates that 4,238 civilians were killed last year alone. As a result of the turmoil, nearly twelve million people have been displaced, according to an October 26 U.N. news release. Both the RSF and the SAF have been accused of committing war crimes, while the RSF stands accused of committing genocide against the non-Arab Masalit, Zaghawa, and Fur peoples, all of whom have been targeted through mass killings and sexual violence.
RSF soldiers have burned their victims to death, buried them alive, and used rape as a weapon of war. In April, the RSF decimated Zamzam, Sudan’s largest camp for internally displaced persons, massacring many of its residents and leaving the survivors displaced once again outside of el-Fasher. What medical facilities remain in the region are overwhelmed and underequipped.
Even prior to the city’s fall to the RSF, October had been a particularly deadly month for el-Fasher, with RSF forces targeting mosques and hospitals in deadly bombings since the beginning of this year. Before its capture, el-Fasher was considered the last significant SAF stronghold remaining in Darfur. Raised banks of sand or gravel built by the RSF, known as berms or earthen walls, hinder its residents from escaping attacks, creating what an August report from the Yale School of Public Health called “a literal kill box.” As long as the gunfire continues, Saeneen says, they are “waiting for their fate.”
Throughout Sudan’s tumultuous history, Anglo-Egyptian annexation, Western wars, and Arab supremacism have fueled displacement and ethnic tensions across Darfur. In 1989, amid a protracted civil war, the SAF overthrew Sudan’s democratically elected leadership and installed a dictatorial regime led by Omar al-Bashir, who feared the possibility of a burgeoning separatist movement among non-Arab rebels in Darfur. To combat these rebels, Bashir, instrumentalizing pre-existing tensions, enlisted a collective of armed Arab groups, who eventually became known as the Janjaweed paramilitary.
By 2003, the Janjaweed’s terrorism and ethnic cleansing in Darfur had drawn global attention to the region. But as the rest of the world declared peace following the return of refugees to Darfur in 2012, believing the atrocities to be over, the humanitarian crisis in Sudan continued to escalate. Violence in the region continued. By 2015, a Human Rights Watch report detailed horrific crimes against humanity being routinely perpetrated by soldiers of the nascent RSF, which had formed out of former Janjaweed militias in 2013.
Saeneen, whose hometown of Shearia is less than 200 kilometres from el-Fasher, has seen the impact that endless war has on its survivors firsthand. A few months after the 1989 coup, when he was seven years old, soldiers came to his community, rounded people up, and massacred them in the bush. His father was among those killed. Saeneen remained in Darfur for another decade, until conflict began to escalate in 1999. Now supporting Sudanese refugees from afar, he repeatedly stumbles through bewilderment as he recounts a familiar story all over again.
He calls the situation in Darfur a problem of “cumulative marginalization,” wherein the region’s underdevelopment and persistent ethnic tensions have been downplayed over decades by the Sudanese state as well as the rest of the world. In rallying behind the SAF, he claims, the people of Sudan have chosen the lesser of two evils. “That doesn’t mean that we forgot what Bashir, his crewmen of the ancient regime, and the high brass of the military institution have done,” he says, referring to the dream for a democratic Sudan that fueled the revolutionary movement, and eventually led to a successful coup against Bashir in 2019.
Yasser Essa, a Canadian-Sudanese peacebuilding and humanitarian emergency response expert, tells The Progressive that despite Sudanese peoples’ and allied militias’ support for the SAF, marginalization under Bashir’s rule sowed the seeds of current division by “intentionally trying to keep Darfuris away from power.” Twenty years ago, he says, the people of Darfur “dreamed of going back to their homelands from which they were displaced. But now they are just hoping to survive this war.”
For some, joining the RSF has been a necessary choice for survival. Others are disillusioned by the SAF’s corruption, including Bashir’s integration of the Janjaweed into the military and government. “Do they have to support the Sudanese Armed Forces in this situation,” he posits, “knowing the forces, deep down, are controlled by the former regime which everyone paid with blood to overthrow? It’s not about legitimacy.”
The SAF’s own war crimes—reported by the United Nations human rights office and including the bombing of places of worship and racist violence toward the people of North Darfur in communities from which many RSF and former Janjaweed members originated—have only deepened resentment against the Sudanese junta among marginalized communities in Darfur.
“There’s no complexity about this,” humanitarian expert Mukesh Kapila tells The Progressive of the rival forces’ motivations. Kapila previously served as the U.N. Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan, overseeing diplomatic negotiations in a mission he has called “extremely ill-prepared and unfit for purpose” during the Janjaweed militia’s genocide in 2003 and 2004. Today, the divide between the RSF and the SAF is “as old-fashioned racist as you can get,” he says.
While an enforceable resolution to assemble up to 26,000 U.N. peacekeeping forces to protect civilians in Darfur was able to pass through the U.N. Security Council with the help of U.S. pressure in 2007, Kapila doubts that a similar measure could be put in place now. “The whole of Sudan is a crime scene,” he says, denouncing the SAF’s abandonment of civilians in el-Fasher. At this point, he tells The Progressive, officials have simply chosen to “let the massacres finish.”
This is not the first time that other countries have stood idly by as the Sudanese government has betrayed its own people. According to Eric Reeves, a U.S. scholar and humanitarian expert who has testified before Congress to advocate for Sudan, former President Barack Obama turned a blind eye to the situation in Sudan, appointing as special envoy a former Air Force general named Scott Gration. Reeves tells The Progressive that Gration, who negotiated with Bashir despite the International Criminal Court’s charging him with genocide, “did tremendous damage in the time he was there.” Gration validated Bashir’s fraudulent re-election in 2010, and was widely criticized for ignoring Darfuris’ warnings about the dictator’s escalation of tribal tensions. As a result, the Obama Administration came to be viewed by critics as operating cynically to maintain its sources of counter-terrorism intelligence in the capital city of Khartoum.
In the past few months, key leadership transitions have taken place on both sides of the conflict—in May, SAF leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan appointed Kamil Idris as prime minister of Sudan, while the warlord Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known commonly as Hemedti) was named head of the rival government associated with the RSF-led coalition known as “Ta’sis” in August. Sudan now stands at a crossroads between the future possibilities of transitional civilian government and state partition—against the protestations of the U.N. Security Council, which says that partition undermines both the future of Sudan and “peace and stability across the wider region.”
“It’s sad when countries split up, there’s no question about that,” Kapila says. “But in terms of a country, it’s the people that matter. Politically, people don’t want to say that, and the U.N. is obviously not going to say that.”
Addressing the U.N. General Assembly in September, Sudanese Prime Minister Kamil Idris called for international enforcement of the twenty-year-old U.N. Security Council resolution for a sweeping arms embargo on Darfur. There must be “no foreign interference or pressure” on Sudan to adopt a particular course of action, he added, denouncing the “political exploitation of human rights” and calling on countries to stop the flow of mercenaries and weapons coming into the region through regional arms agreements.
The Sudanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has deemed the RSF a terrorist organization and denounced its “systematic campaign of terror against civilians,” calling on the African Union and the international Organization of Islamic Cooperation to enforce the U.N. Security Council’s 2024 resolution to end fighting in el-Fasher. Meanwhile, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) have jointly developed a roadmap for ending the conflict, which would include a ceasefire agreement between the SAF and the RSF, the withdrawal of the RSF, and an end to the RSF’s siege of el-Fasher. With Egypt and Saudi Arabia backing the SAF and the U.A.E. accused of arming the RSF, however, the credibility of peace promises has eroded.
Saeneen says that since the RSF took el-Fasher, he has lost contact with many of his friends, relatives, and contacts in Darfur. Despite a communication blackout over el-Fasher, as-yet unverified videos from el-Fasher continue to appear on social media. Satellite images from October 27 analyzed by Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab point to evidence of a massacre, with blood stains and mass graves marking the RSF’s path of siege. Reports of kidnapping for ransom are routine, as well. Within the past few days, the RSF has also committed summary executions of people fleeing el-Fasher to the town of Tawila, about seventy kilometres away.
As the RSF continues to deepen its grip over Darfur, conflict monitors are on the lookout for activity in Tiné, a town spilling into Chad in a Zaghawa region, just north of RSF control. Around 20,000 people fled to Tiné after the massacre at Zamzam in April. In the past few weeks, Sudanese media have noted an increase in RSF forces in the area ahead of the takeover of el-Fasher.
Food and water have now run out, as Darfur’s future has snapped shut once again. “What they call the revolution,” Saeneen says, “this is what it has become.”