The horrors unfolding in Sudan rival the nightmares of this century’s worst massacres. The situation, the United Nations warns, is spiralling out of control. The horrors, so gruesome that even American news outlets cannot look away, are “visible from space” — blood pooling on the ground, piles of human remains, lines of terrified people who could be next. After a year and a half of fighting, the city of El Fasher, which had been the last stronghold of the Sudanese military, fell — unleashing a wave of Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militants on the hundreds of thousands of innocents inside the city. As the sand wall around the city was toppled, armed men opened fire on the local people, mowing down helpless men, women, and children as others videotaped the rampage. “They would ask a man to run,” one survivor said. “Once you start running, they shoot you.” “It was like a killing field. Bodies everywhere and people bleeding and no one to help them,” Tajal-Rahman told the Associated Press after he escaped to a nearby town.
“Some people were run over by vehicles,” reiterated Saeeda, a 28-year-old woman. “While we were on the road, they took girls from our group — choosing them and dragging them away.” Trapped like caged animals, the locals were lined up and executed. In grisly footage uploaded by the RSF fighters, the carnage is chilling. “One, shows dozens of bodies on the ground and fighters with RSF insignia walking among them as vehicles burn nearby and sporadic gunfire pops off in the background. In eerie echoes of Hamas, the soldiers went door to door through the houses, “beating and shooting” at everyone inside. Some of the worst scenes took place at the city’s only functioning hospital, where the World Health Organization can confirm that more than 460 patients, doctors, nurses, and staff were murdered in cold blood. For women and young girls, the terror is being caught alive. “At least 25 women were gang raped when RSF’s forces entered a shelter for displaced people near El Fasher University. Witnesses confirm RSF’s personnel selected women and girls and raped them at gunpoint,”
Seif Magango, spokesperson for the U.N. human rights office, said somberly. And there’s no way to know the extent of these atrocities, since the area is under a complete communications blackout. What international aid groups do know is from the small number who escaped. Nathaniel Raymond, the executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, pored over the high-res satellite images, telling NBC News that the “‘activity that suggests mass killing on a level that can only be compared to Rwanda,’ where an estimated 800,000 people were killed in 1994 by armed militias from a rival ethnic group. ‘We have never seen a velocity of violence at this scale,’ he said in a telephone interview. Surrounded by desert, there is no easy place to run to. While close to a quarter million people were living in El Fasher last August, the United Nations estimated that 62,000 had fled in the week, but only a fraction — 5,000 — had made it the 40 miles to Tawila by Friday.
Most who made it to the town were starving, disoriented, and dehydrated, but others, “including gunshot victims, travelled on foot, hiding by daylight and trekking at night to avoid armed men along main roads,” the Times notes. Top U.N. humanitarian official Tom Fletcher told the Security Council that hundreds who’ve made it to relative safety have untreated bullet wounds, ‘and many bear signs of torture,’” Scores of children, many who are now orphans, are being picked up and carried to safety by escaping strangers. Thousands are unaccounted for, trapped inside El Fasher, where witnesses describe “widespread executions and routine shelling.” “If people are still in El Fasher, it will be very difficult for them to survive,” one of the refugee camp organizers warned. For Sudan, it’s another tragedy in a long history of tragedies. The country’s civil war — long considered one of the worst humanitarian crises in history — was a genocidal bloodbath, a time when the word “Darfur” reverberated across Africa as the darkest of chapters.
After a period of brief peace under the transitional government in 2020, the country seemed to be turning a corner — repealing its dangerous apostasy law and inching toward a culture of religious tolerance. Two years later, the nation was plunged back into chaos when fighting broke out between RSF’s leadership and the Sudanese military, reigniting the wave of terrorism against innocent civilians. Yale’s Raymond “said he feared the paramilitary group, which grew out of the notorious Janjaweed Arab militias that carried out a genocide during the Darfur conflict in the 2000s, was ‘finishing the liquidation of Darfur.’ Declan Walsh, the Times’ chief Africa correspondent, says the people of Sudan are hunted as never before. “The first time Darfur tipped into chaos; there was at least some degree of Western pressure. This time,” he writes sadly, “there’s little political attention, and impunity for abuses is rife. The fighters rampaging across Darfur are armed, organized and funded better than ever. And they are backed by one of the wealthiest countries in the wider region, the United Arab Emirates. (The Emirates has denied backing either side in the conflict.).”
In April of 2023, when the country began to unravel, church leaders were desperate for help. “We feel forgotten,” they said, even then. “The situation is deteriorating every day, and there is no response from the world. There is a strong feeling of abandonment,” they told Open Doors. “There is no security, no protection. Not from the warring parties or from opportunists who will use this situation to further their own agendas. Christians, churches have been attacked with impunity.” Walsh notes that President Trump is doing everything he can to stop the killing, even pressing his special advisor in Africa to try to negotiate a ceasefire. “But so far there has been little sign of success. One reason is that participants include diplomats from the Emirates, Egypt and Saudi Arabia — the same Arab powers that are fuelling the conflict.” These entanglements only complicate the administration’s work, while families are pinned down, starving, in a town crawling with fighters who want them dead.
Maybe, Senator James Risch (R-Idaho) and others argue, the president could declare RSF a foreign terrorist organization, which would unlock new ways to pressure Sudan to end the slaughter. “That would be a good start,” the editorial board of The Washington Post agreed. “It’s difficult to imagine the suffering happening there right now,” Family Research Council’s Arielle Del Turco told The Washington Stand, “and difficult to comprehend the scope of the issue with hundreds of thousands of civilians unaccounted for. Christians should pray for a supernatural peace in Sudan, for the protection of innocent civilians, and that people’s hearts would turn to the Lord in the midst of this atrocity.” Something must be done — before everyone in El Fasher is lost. Just as the United States cannot sit by and watch the brutal savagery against the Uyghurs in China, the Christians in Nigeria, and the Jews in Israel, it cannot turn a blind eye here. Indifference, against this evil, is deadly.
Source: The Washington Stand
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