A GROUP IN WAD MADANI, IN SOUTH-EASTERN SUDAN, RALLY IN SUPPORT OF SUDAN'S ARMY IN DECEMBER, AS THE WAR WITH THE PARAMILITARY RAPID SUPPORT FORCES CONTINUES AND REFUGEES FLEE DARFUR IN WESTERN SUDAN. PHOTOGRAPH: AFP/GETTY IMAGES
‘THEY TOLD US – YOU ARE SLAVES’: SURVIVORS GIVE HARROWING TESTIMONY OF DARFUR’S YEAR OF HELL
BY: FRED HARTERORIGINAL SITE: THE GUARDIAN
With the war in Sudan poised to escalate and the humanitarian crisis growing, traumatised survivors of a blood-drenched summer in West Darfur tell of their ordeal
With the war in Sudan poised to escalate and the humanitarian crisis growing, traumatised survivors of a blood-drenched summer in West Darfur tell of their ordeal
G amar al-Deen was visiting a friend when gunmen poured into his neighbourhood on 27 April 2023. “I came back to find they were all dead,” he says. “My mother, my father, uncles, brothers, sisters. I wanted to die myself in that moment.”
Deen, a teacher, lost a dozen members of his family that day. Several of his neighbours were killed too.
The attack was one of many by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary organisation, and allied Arab militiamen in El Geneina, capital of Sudan’s West Darfur region, between mid-April and mid-June. Their fighters carried out almost daily raids against areas of the city populated by the Masalit, an African ethnic group, according to former residents.
The attacks happened as the world’s attention was focused on fighting 700 miles away in the capital, Khartoum, as foreign governments launched frantic airlifts to evacuate their citizens . The scale of the tragedy unfolding in Darfur, a region ravaged by 20 years of genocidal violence, would only begin to emerge weeks later .
Sometimes the attacks were targeted, as the militiamen hunted down educated Masalits on kill lists. Mostly they were not. Masalit men and boys were accused of being fighters and summarily shot. Women and girls were killed. Women were raped near corpses.
There’s nobody in El Geneina. It’s ghostly quiet. It’s horrific to see areas once full of life now totally empty.
Aid worker:
Mahmoud Adam, a former interpreter with the African Union’s Darfur peacekeeping force, which left at the end of 2020 , lived close to an RSF base in the city. He said Arab militia would arrive most mornings on horses and motorbikes before heading out to launch attacks on Masalit neighbours.
“For two months, this was their routine,” says Adam. “I would hear them talking about the number of people they had killed at the end of each day.”
The attacks started on 24 April, according to residents, just over a week after nationwide fighting erupted between the Sudanese military and the RSF. They culminated in mid-June, after the killing of the governor of West Darfur , a Masalit, which prompted a panicked evacuation of El Geneina’s Masalit residents to neighbouring Chad and the outlying district of Ardamata, home to a large military base.