Looming Darfur carnage likely to spur deadly revenge
“Massacre.” “Carnage.” “Bloodshed.” United Nations observers and human rights organizations have said they fear the worst in the event the ongoing siege by Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces on El Fasher — the last stronghold of the opposing Sudanese Armed Forces in Darfur — culminates in an attack.
Since the outbreak of the war in Sudan in April 2023, El Fasher has turned into Darfur’s largest humanitarian hub. Today, it’s home to around 1.5 million people, including 800,000 internally displaced persons.
An informal peace deal between the warring parties — the Sudanese Armed Forces, or SAF, under General Abdel Fattah Burhan, and his rival, the head of the Rapid
Support Forces, or RSF, General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo — has so far granted relative safety for the city’s growing population.
This situation, however, changed last month when two armed groups in El Fasher, the Sudan Liberation Army and the
Justice and Equality Movement, announced plans to side with the Sudanese Armed Forces.
“These two groups not only have their own local networks, but they see the Rapid Support Forces as a shared enemy, which is a very potent driver to unite them,” Hager
Ali, a researcher at the German think tank GIGA Institute for Global and Area Studies, told DW.
In turn, the RSF stepped up its military efforts to ensure these new alliances neither get too strong, nor that they could strike military counter campaigns, she added.
“El Fasher now hosts the largest population in the cities of Darfur, including camps for internally displaced people and over 50 shelter centers within the city,” said Michelle D’Arcy, Sudan country director of the Norwegian People’s Aid organisation.
Yet, the current tensions around El Fasher have prevented the entry of humanitarian aid, she confirmed.
Toby Harward, the UN’s deputy humanitarian coordinator for Sudan, said earlier this month that the humanitarian situation in and around El Fasher is catastrophic.
“There has been a significant deterioration in the security situation, including increasing arbitrary killings, theft of livestock, systematic burning of entire villages in rural areas, escalating air bombardments of parts of the city and a tightening siege around El Fasher, which has halted humanitarian aid convoys and choked off commercial trade,” he said in a report on May 2.
A recent analysis by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab also confirmed that 23 communities in North Darfur have been burned in apparent arson attacks since mid-April.
And according to the UN World Food Program, “time is running out to prevent starvation in the vast region.”
US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield told reporters in late April she fears “history is repeating itself in Darfur in the worst possible way,” adding that El Fasher was “on the precipice of a large-scale massacre.”
After the outbreak of war in April 2023, the fighting between the SAF and RSF quickly extended from Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, to Darfur — where a part of the population identifies as Arab and others as African — and where the RSF is based.