More than two million people in Sudan have been forced from their homes as a result of two months of fighting between the country’s army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), according to the United Nations.
Sudan plunged into chaos on April 15 as months-long tensions between the army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the RSF commander, Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, erupted into war.
Fighting continued unabated on Wednesday in parts of the capital, Khartoum, and the western region of Darfur, places where some of the worst fighting has taken place so far. According to the Sudan Doctors Syndicate, which tracks civilian casualties, at least 959 civilians were killed and about 4,750 others wounded as of June 12.
The medical group said the toll could be much higher as it could not account for the deaths or injuries in the ongoing fighting in el-Geneina, the provincial capital of western Darfur. The city’s hospitals have been out of order since fighting broke out there in April, the group said.
According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the brutal clashes have forced more than 1.6 million people to leave their homes and move to safer areas in Sudan. About 530,000 others have fled to neighboring Egypt, South Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia, the Central African Republic and Libya, the UN migration service said.
All of Sudan’s 18 provinces have experienced displacement, with Khartoum topping the list with about 65 percent of total displaced people, followed by West Darfur with more than 17 percent, according to the IOM’s Displacement Tracking Matrix.
Ethnic targeting
In el-Geneina, the RSF and allied Arab militias rampaged through the town over the past week, killing and wounding hundreds. Local activists and UN officials were quoted by The Associated Press news agency.
Activists and residents of el-Geneina also reported that dozens of women were sexually assaulted in their homes and as they tried to flee the fighting. Nearly all of the rape cases were attributed to the RSF, which the AP said did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
On Tuesday, Volker Perthes, the UN envoy to Sudan, said fighting in el-Geneina had taken on “an ethnic dimension,” with Arab militias and gunmen in RSF uniforms “creating an emerging pattern of large-scale targeted attacks against civilian-based groups.” their ethnic identity”.
Such attacks, “if verified, could amount to crimes against humanity,” Perthes warned.
The RSF denies any involvement in attacks against civilians in Darfur, but refugees who spoke to Al Jazeera last month in settlements in Chad said they had seen men in RSF uniforms join the fight alongside Arab armed groups.
Khamis Abdalla Abkar, the provincial governor of West Darfur province, accused the RSF and allied armed groups of attacking local communities across el-Geneina. In a telephone interview on Wednesday with Saudi television station Al-Hadath, he urged the international community to intervene to protect civilians in his province.
“We have not seen the army leave its base to defend people,” he said.
More than a dozen refugees interviewed by Al Jazeera in Chad last month had said violence broke out in their towns and villages after the army or local police left, creating a power vacuum that was filled by Arab militias. No resident said the military provided any protection.
Alice Wairimu Nderitu, the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, also condemned “the shocking violence” in el-Geneina. She warned in a statement on Tuesday that such fighting could turn into “renewed campaigns of rape, murder and ethnic cleansing amounting to atrocities”.
Sudan has been without a functioning government since September 2021, when al-Burhan and Hemedti sacked Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok’s caretaker government and declared a state of emergency in a move labeled a “coup d’état” by political forces.
The transition period, which began in August 2019 after the ouster of former ruler Omar al-Bashir, is set to end with elections in early 2024.
Darfur had been the scene of a brutal war in the early 2000s, when al-Bashir and the army fought armed and recruited Arab militias nicknamed the Janjaweed against mostly non-Arab armed groups, who rose up against the state and accused them of neglect and exploitation. . In 2013, the Janjaweed were reorganized into the RSF under the leadership of Hemedti.
An estimated 300,000 people have died in the two-decade-long conflict in Darfur.