HIbrahim al-Bab, a U.S. national security agent, had already lost his son in the early days of Sudan's civil war, when his tent was set on fire and he burned to death inside. As she fled west toward the border, she was arrested by a militia affiliated with the Rapid Support Forces militia. With Chad.
The 24-year-old said the bullet passed near her head. Five male relatives were separated from the group she was traveling with, taken to a stream and shot in the chest.
“If you're black, you're done,” Arbab said, describing his experience in the ethnic violence that hit Darfur for the second time this century.
Reports of massacres by the RSF and its allied Arab militias emerged shortly after war broke out in April 2023 between the RSF and regular forces, the Sudanese National Army, and its allies. Much of what the outside world has learned about this atrocity has been told by survivors from the Adre refugee camp across the border in Chad.
Speaking in Adore, Arbab said that sometimes his Bargo people escape violence, but sometimes they don't. “The militia tested us. [darker skinned people] It’s about our language,” she said. “Even if you could speak Bargo, you were sometimes fired. If you couldn't, you were killed.”
The United States announced on Tuesday that it had determined that genocide was being committed by the RSF and its allies and was imposing sanctions on RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemediti.
The RSF and SAF have been accused of committing war crimes during the war, which cost tens of thousands of lives. “Both warring parties are responsible for the violence and suffering in Sudan and lack the legitimacy to govern a future peaceful Sudan,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement. But Blinken said the RSF and its allies were responsible for a pattern of systematic ethnic violence in which civilians trying to flee the fighting were killed and access to essential goods cut off.
In 2004, the United States declared that the notorious Janjaweed militia, a predecessor of the RSF, had committed genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s. Then, as now, violence was directed against dark-skinned non-Arab groups.
Some of the most serious allegations related to RSF are again focused on Darfur. In Darfur, up to 15,000 people were killed in a well-documented attack on the city of Juneina in 2023 that targeted non-Arab Masalit and other ethnic groups.
Naima Mughaddam, another member of the Bargo group, told Adore's Guardian newspaper that two of her brothers were killed in Juneina because of their ethnicity. The men who killed her brother also beat her, leaving her unable to move for three days. “Telling them that I am not Masalit did not protect me from attack,” she said. “I was beaten and humiliated, but I was lucky not to be raped.”
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Tagreed Ahmed Khatir arrived in Adre last summer after fleeing El Fasher, a city in northern Darfur state that has been under siege by the RSF since April last year. She said male members of her ethnic Zaghawa tribe were targeted during the fighting in El Fasher and at checkpoints on roads outside the city. In some cases, dark-skinned men fleeing Darfur have tried to disguise themselves as women to pass through RSF checkpoints, UN officials said.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed and more than eight million internally displaced since the war began, making Sudan the site of the world's largest internal displacement crisis. The United Nations says more than 30 million people, more than half of them children, are in need of assistance.
In October, the United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Sudan accused the RSF and its allied militias of “widespread sexual and gender-based violence,” including “rape, sexual slavery” and other abuses. The mission also documented cases of gender-based violence committed by the military and its allies. For much of the conflict, the United Nations has struggled to raise even a quarter of its targeted funds for the humanitarian response in the impoverished country.
