Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it’s investigating the financials of Elon Musk’s pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, ‘The A Word’, which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Read more
If the reports emerging from the city of el-Fasher in the Darfur region of western Sudan are even remotely true, then it is a name that will live in infamy. The rebels known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) captured the area from the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) some days ago after an 18-month siege, and thousands have been the victims of atrocities. The Yale University Humanitarian Research Lab has been monitoring the situation using human intelligence sources and satellite imagery, and says it is a “Rwanda-style wave of hyper-violence” (recalling the indiscriminate mass killings in 1994 there).
It would hardly be surprising if that were the case, such has been the viciousness of the fighting and the routine fact of genocide taking place across this fractured nation. While the world’s eyes have been trained on the merciless conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, the civil war in Sudan, less enmeshed in great power rivalries and with fewer geopolitical connections, has attracted less attention. Yet the scale of human suffering in the last few years has been on a historic, unimaginable scale, with sadistic killing allied to famine and administrative collapse: 11.7 million people forcibly displaced, with 4.2 million seeking asylum outside their own country; hundreds of thousands of children dead through malnutrition; widespread rape and violence against civilians, much of it ethnically motivated.
The foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, describes the situation in stark, honest terms: “Atrocities, mass executions, starvation and the devastating use of rape as a weapon of war, with women and children bearing the brunt of the largest humanitarian crisis in the 21st century.”
Aside from the RSF and the SAF there are many more ever-shifting factions and militias driven by ethnic hatreds, tribal loyalties and even more mercenary motives, and the country, never stable, has descended into a kaleidoscope of horrors since the long-running civil war reignited in April 2023.
Never known for rushing to judgement, even the Trump administration has recognised the extent of the crimes against humanity that have been and still are being committed in Sudan. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, in his confirmation hearing in January was forthright: “In an era in which the term genocide has been misappropriated to almost an international slander, this is a real genocide by its very definition. This is the ethnic targeting of specific groups for extermination, for elimination.”
That the Sudanese civil war attracts so little international attention is partly because it is a tragically intractable conflict, or, more accurately, constantly evolving sets of conflicts. At its base are conflicts about land and water, exacerbated by climate change and cultural differences that seem irreconcilable. It inspires only despair.
What is happening now in Sudan can be traced back to rivalries between the Arab and non-Arab populations, Muslims and non-Muslims, between the north, south and west of the country, between warlords and tribes that were simmering even before independence from Britain and Egypt in 1956. Since then the country has barely known stability, with the fighting in recent years centring on the capital Khartoum and the Darfur region, one of the most deprived and desperate places on Earth. Even after South Sudan finally broke away and became independent in 2011, the conflicts in the rest of the republic continued, with the RSF now at war with the Sudanese authorities growing out of the pro-Arab Janjaweed militias.
Yet over the years the conflict has been punctuated by attempts at peace, brokered by nearby and interested powers such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Ethiopia, as well as by the United Nations, the African Union, East African Community and the local Intergovernmental Authority on Development. What is new in making an already appalling situation far worse is the unprecedented levels of foreign interference, including by some nations nominally promoting peace in Sudan – including the United Arab Emirates, the Wagner Group, Russia (apparently playing both sides and also drawing in Ukraine), Turkey and Iran – plus the warring factions in Yemen. Such involvement has meant that Sudan, one of the poorest places in the world, has seen the deployment of the most complex of modern military technology, such as drones, as well as medieval techniques of human cruelty.
Mr Rubio has called this out, and specifically criticised the UAE’s alleged supply of hardware to the RSF, and his lead should be followed by all responsible Western nations. For the moment President Donald Trump seems more preoccupied with Nigeria and a threat to invade it “all guns blazing” to defeat Islamist insurgents. Still, given his new-found passion for peacemaking, he may also make some time to push allies, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, to back peace negotiations again. The violence of a great arc of terrorism and instability – stretching from the Sahel through the Horn of Africa into the Middle East – is now intensifying, with one consequence being a likely further wave of refugees heading towards Europe.
The immediate aim, however, as in Gaza and Ukraine, has to be the delivery of adequate humanitarian aid – a huge project in the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. As elsewhere too, it requires a ceasefire between warring parties who don’t see a pause in fighting as serving their own interests. Despondency is the natural reaction, but the diplomatic work has to go on even in the face of the challenges, and even with the reality that the killing may get worse before any of the various armed groups are either sated or exhausted.
