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In Sudan, the city of Al Fashir, the capital of the northern Darfur region, has been under siege since mid-April by the paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF in the English acronym), i.e. the militia that has been fighting against the Sudanese regular army (Sudan Armed Forces, SAF) a very harsh civil war. In recent days the United Nations had defined a large-scale invasion as imminent, which could cause a further worsening of humanitarian conditions in the city, already seriously deteriorated since the last weeks of siege.
Another fear is that the entry of the RSF into the city will cause ethnic massacres against the population. Darfur had already been the subject of terrible ethnic-based attacks since 2003, when during a civil war the local population was massacred in what many called a genocide. The risk is that the same situation could repeat itself in Al Fashir: last week the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said he was “gravely concerned about the escalation of violence in and around Al Fashir” and he spoke explicitly of “indiscriminate attacks” in the city’s residential neighborhoods.
Al Fashir has around 300 thousand inhabitants and is the only large city in Darfur that has not yet been conquered by the RSF, which already controls four of the five states that make up Darfur. According to Toby Harward, coordinator for Darfur of UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, there are however 1.5 million people present in the city, of which around 800 thousand are internal refugees who have arrived in the city from other parts of Darfur.
As the Sudanese journalist Zeinab Mohammed Salih wrote on Financial Times, in Al Fashir people are preparing for the imminent attack by the RSF: first aid courses are held in the city to help those who will be injured and leaflets are distributed explaining how to prepare a body for burial. A citizen of Al Fashir interviewed by Salih, in explaining the worsening of the situation for civilians, said that “death has become normality” and that “today one doesn’t stop much when one learns that one of one’s acquaintances he’s been killed”. According to UN estimates, from 2003 to 2023, violence in Darfur caused millions of refugees and 300,000 deaths.
The current civil war in Sudan began last year and is being fought between the regular Sudanese army, commanded by the country’s president, General Abdel Fattah al Burhan, and the RSF, commanded by the then vice-president of the country, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti. For some months, the RSF have gradually gained more and more ground, to the point of threatening Darfur.
Fears of ethnic massacres arise from the fact that the RSF descends directly from Janjaweed, the Arab militias who during a previous civil war, in 2003, carried out the worst massacres in Darfur, a region with a non-Arab majority. In 2003, according to the NGO Human Rights Watch, the Janjaweed were responsible for killings, rapes and war crimes committed mainly against non-Arab communities. For that violence, the then Sudanese president Omar al Bashir, with whom the Janjaweed were allied, was indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and genocide.
A Sudanese rebel in Darfur in 2005, during the previous civil war (Scott Nelson/Getty Images)
Second https://twitter.com/USAmbUN/status/1785013546239054272, who represents the United States at the UN Security Council, the city of Al Fashir is currently “on the verge of a large-scale massacre”. A massacre that would add to an already critical humanitarian situation both due to the armed clashes in the Darfur region and the ongoing famine. As Declan Walsh, correspondent of the New York Timesin the Zamzam refugee camp, just 7 kilometers from Al Fashir, 40 percent of children aged between 6 months and 2 years suffer from serious malnutrition, so much so that according to the NGO Doctors Without Borders the situation would be “catastrophic ».
In recent weeks, according to the United Nations, at least 43 civilians have died in Al Fashir, including children: the regular army’s air force is attacking RSF positions, which respond with bombings that mainly hit civilian homes.
The UN Security Council met in an emergency session behind closed doors last Monday, April 29, at the end of which Thomas-Greenfield said that “history in Darfur is repeating itself in the worst possible way.” The US diplomat’s reference is to the massacres carried out by the Janjaweed in 2003.
Despite the serious shortage of food and basic necessities, the United Nations, which is present in the region and which until 2020 managed UNAMID (the joint UN and African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur), is having difficulty get humanitarian aid to its destination. The RSF is blocking aid in the area of Melit, a town north-east of Al Fashir. While the Sudanese army has blocked international aid arriving through Chad, with the exception of the portion of the border controlled by allied groups.
In recent years, NGOs and agencies operating in Darfur have had to suspend their activities and leave the country: in April 2023, three workers of the World Food Programme, also known as WFP or by its English acronym WFP, were killed, and the episode prompted the agency to temporarily suspend all operations in Sudan.
The importance of Al Fashir is also strategic: if the RSF conquered the entire city they would control about a third of the entire Sudan, one of the largest countries in Africa populated by almost 50 million people: according to some analysts, it is not to be exclude a partition of the country, with the RSF of commander Hemedti in control of the entire Darfur to the west, while to the east the regular army commanded by General Abdel Fattah al Burhan which today has its base in Port Sudan, on the Red Sea.
– Listen also: Globe – Understanding something about the clashes in Sudan, with Sara De Simone
