Husna Ibrahim Arbab had already lost her son in the early days of Sudan’s civil war – burned to death in his tent after it was set on fire – when she was apprehended by militia aligned with the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group while fleeing west towards the border with Chad.
A bullet flew by close to her head, the 24-year-old said. Five male relatives were separated from the group she was travelling with, taken to a creek, and shot in the chest.
“If you are black, you are finished,” is how Arbab described her experience of the ethnically targeted violence that has swept through Darfur for the second time this century.
Accounts of massacres perpetrated by the RSF and allied Arab militias emerged shortly after war broke out in April 2023 between the RSF and the regular army, the Sudanese Armed Forces, and its allied groups. Much of what the outside world has learned about the atrocities has been relayed by survivors from refugee camps in Adré, across the border in Chad.
Speaking in Adré, Arbab said that sometimes members of her Bargo ethnic group were spared violence, and sometimes they weren’t. “The militia tested us [darker skinned people] on our language,” she said. “If you could speak Bargo then sometimes you were let go. If you couldn’t, you were killed.”
The US said on Tuesday it had determined that genocide was being perpetrated by the RSF and its allies and that it was imposing sanctions on the RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo – known as Hemedti.
The RSF and the SAF have been accused of committing war crimes during the war, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives. The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said in a statement that “both belligerents bear responsibility for the violence and suffering in Sudan and lack the legitimacy to govern a future peaceful Sudan”. However, Blinken said the RSF and its allies were responsible for a pattern of systematic ethnic violence in which civilians were killed as they tried to flee fighting and access to essential supplies was blocked.
In 2004, the US had declared that the RSF’s forerunner – the notorious Janjaweed militias – had committed genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s. Then, as now, the violence was directed against darker-skinned, non-Arab groups.
Some of the most serious allegations relating to the RSF have once again focused on Darfur, where up to 15,000 people died in well-documented attacks on the city of Geneina in 2023 that targeted the non-Arab Masalit and other ethnic groups.
Naima Mugadam, another member of the Bargo group, told the Guardian in Adré that two of her brothers had been killed because of their ethnicity in Geneina. The men who killed her brothers also beat her up, she said, leaving her unable to move for three days. “Telling them that I was not a Masalit did not protect me from being attacked,” she said. “I was beaten and humiliated, and lucky not to be raped.”
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Taghreed Ahmed Khatir arrived in Adré last summer after fleeing El Fasher, a city in north Darfur state that has been under siege by the RSF since April last year. She said male members of her ethnic Zaghawa group were targeted during the fighting in El Fasher and at checkpoints on the roads out of the city. In some instances darker skinned men trying to get out of Darfur have tried to disguise themselves as women to get past RSF checkpoints, a United Nations employeesaid.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed and more than 8 million internally displaced since the war began, making Sudan the scene of the world’s largest internal displacement crisis. The UN says more than 30 million people – over half of them children – are in need of aid.
In October, the UN independent international fact-finding mission for Sudan accused the RSF and its allied militias of “widespread sexual and gender-based violence” including “rape, sexual slavery” and other abuses. The mission has also documented cases of gender-based violence committed by the army and allied groups. For much of the conflict, the UN has struggled to raise even a quarter of the funds it has targeted for its humanitarian response in the impoverished country.
