A new Srebrenica massacre is now upon the world, and much like the U.N.’s inaction then, the international community’s continued apathy will now allow for yet another mass slaughter in Sudan.
Srebrenica — which occurred in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina in July 1995 — is an analogy for the world’s current inaction, but the 2003–05 genocide in Darfur is a more direct example of the horrors the city of el-Fasher now faces at the hands of the Rapid Support Forces, who took the city on Oct. 26 after 18 months of protracted siege.
The preceding engagement between the RSF and Sudanese Armed Forces was marked by mass starvation and indiscriminate bombardment, which has reduced the civilian population within the city from roughly 1.5 million in early 2023, to around 170,000 to 250,000 as of Oct. 29, through willful flight or the RSF’s campaign of slaughter.
Many managed to flee the city prior to its final capture. Neighboring Tawila is now home to more than 800,000 displaced people from surrounding regions, but the remaining populace have few ways out as the RSF and its allied militias continue to tighten their control over the surrounding area.
Even more concerning, out of the tens of thousands of civilians who have supposedly fled in the direction of Tawila in the past several days, only a few thousand have reached relative safety.
Since May, RSF fighters have steadily built up a connected system of berms — earthen walls — around the city, now stretching 19 miles and surrounding almost the entire city. Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, which broke the initial report about the circumvallation of the city, has been monitoring satellite footage of the city since its fall and reported numerous piles of 1.3–2-meter objects — “consistent with the dimensions of a human body” — lying in piles around near the berm, with large red discolorations appearing at various sites as well.
The lab has conducted similar observations of the entire city in recent days, and has found many identical piles and discolorations, with several found around hospitals such as Saudi Maternity Hospital,where the World Health Organization has confirmed over 460 people were killed by RSF fighters.
Though most communications services have been cut off in the city — except for the RSF, who has made use of StarLink to disseminate self-filmed videos documenting their violence, as well as using it to digitally process ransoms from captured fleeing civilians. Survivors who have arrived at nearby towns in the previous week have recounted horrific stories of summary executions, door-to-door massacres and mass sexual violence.
The SAF are solely to blame for the current breakdown. It was under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the armed forces, that the army allied with the RSF to overthrow dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019, before subsequently overthrowing the transitional civilian government in 2021, setting the stage for the current power struggle.
The SAF have themselves constantly carried out grave abuses against their own civilian population. This includes accusations of indiscriminate aerial bombardments and artillery shelling of populated areas, arbitrary detention and torture, along with many other human rights violations.
They have also complicated international relief efforts, highlighted by their recent expulsion of two top World Food Programme officials from the country, with the government still withholding a reason for the sudden ousting.
Still, this utter carelessness and disregard for human life should be contrasted with the RSF, who have — across the group’s long and muddied history — been accused by international criminal courts of carrying out deliberate attacks in Sudan’s western region Darfur, using tactics against non-Arab groups which the U.S. State Department has described as being tantamount to genocide.
The international community, as is often the case, is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Taking this into account, the weight of the world must be put behind the SAF to degrade RSF capabilities and restore state order. Such support should be highly conditional and contingent on immediate guarantees to protect and support civilians.
It is a situation where Elon Musk must cut off all StarLink access for RSF combatants — as he has shown the ability and willingness to do before.The world must seriously begin to clamp down on the UAE — a continued material supporter of the RSF — with targeted sanctions and the withholding of military support for their continued material support the RSF.
Weapons and equipment from the U.K. — officially licensed for export to the UAE — have repeatedly found their way into the hands of RSF fighters.
The world has done far too little to combat the horrors of the war in Sudan. Intrastate conflict harms far more than those within its borders, and the taking of el-Fasher has emboldened the RSF to plan further strikes beyond western Sudan.
An end to the conflict is needed now, and one which ensures the comprehensive disarmament and disbandment of the RSF.
