WASHINGTON (CN) — Another genocide could unfold in Darfur if the U.S. doesn’t make a stronger effort to end the conflict in Sudan, a new report by a refugee organization says.
Refugees International released a report Thursday detailing atrocities in the region as war rages on between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary. The study — completed after the organization interviewed dozens of refugees in neighboring Chad — was critical of Washington’s approach to the conflict and called for more international urgency.
“There is little in place to prevent the current atrocities from devolving into another mass-mortality catastrophe,” Daniel Sullivan, the report’s author, wrote.
The report details “house to house searches, looting and burning of villages, extrajudicial killings, mass graves and widespread use of rape as a weapon of war” targeting so-called Black African tribes in Darfur by the largely Arab Rapid Support Forces.
While fighting in Sudan broke out in April 2023 between the Sudanese Army and the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary, the conflict traces back five years.
After a popular uprising in 2019 led to the ouster of President Omar al-Bashir, an authoritarian ruler who held power for 30 years, the two forces shared power with civilians in a transitional government. But in 2021, the army, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and RSF, controlled by Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, ousted the civilians.
As the country was set to transition to democracy under a Western-brokered deal last year, fighting erupted over a dispute about the paramilitary being integrated into the army.
While the fighting has decimated the capital Khartoum and spread to other regions, deliberate targeting of civilians has escalated in Darfur, where at least 2.3 million people have been displaced. The RSF controls most of that area because it evolved out of the janjaweed Arab militias recruited by al-Bashir to brutally suppress an uprising that resulted in the infamous Darfur genocide, which generated a worldwide outcry in the mid-2000s.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, visited refugee camps in Chad last year and said “to see this happening again is unconscionable.”
“It is incumbent that those who are assisting these two generals to fight this war against the people of Sudan cease those efforts, and the generals [must] go and negotiate a final deal with civilians at the table with them,” she told reporters.
Refugees International said at least 13,000 people have been killed in the conflict, but the actual number is likely much higher. The organization noted that the United Nations has estimated between 10,000 and 15,000 people alone have been killed in El Geneina, Darfur.
Activists and media organizations have been sounding the alarm over ethnic violence in the conflict for months, but the crisis has faded from political discourse in the United States as the Biden administration has loudly and persistently focused on the war in Ukraine and the recent outbreak of violence in Israel and Palestine.
Sara Pantuliano, chief executive of the Overseas Development Institute, said Western governments haven’t done enough to end Sudan’s suffering.
“The crisis we’re seeing in Sudan at this moment is a crisis of epic proportions,” she said. “On the side of the so-called international community, it is one of epic failure.”
The U.S. and Saudi Arabia led ceasefire talks in late spring and early summer, but they broke down and other international efforts to end the bloodshed have ended in failure.
Kholood Khair, founding director of Confluence Advisory, said the situation on the ground is “getting increasingly worse.”
“State collapse is happening quite literally in front of our eyes,” she said. “We’re not seeing an end to this conflict anytime soon.”
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