The ongoing violence against Palestinians in Gaza has fallen out of the headlines since a largely ignored cease-fire agreement was signed in October last year — and even more so after Israel and the U.S. launched their war on Iran. But the ongoing civil war in Sudan has never been a top news headline even though it has killed, injured and displaced more people than any other conflict in the world today.
Those impacted by the Sudan war number in the millions. The Sudanese Armed Forces have been battling an army known as the Rapid Support Forces or RSF. Both sides have committed documented atrocities and war crimes. However, in late October, the RSF took control of the city of El Fasher in the Darfur region in western Sudan, with some reports finding they massacred up to 60,000 people. A United Nations independent fact-finding mission for Sudan concluded that the RSF committed genocide during their 18-month-long siege of El-Fasher.
Early this year, the Sudanese Armed Forces gained the upper hand against the RSF, marking a significant shift in the war. Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab, who assesses the current state of this devastating conflict and the horrifying loss of life.
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: The Sudan Armed Forces have gained military advantage due to the disruption of United Arab Emirates supply flights to the RSF. And the Sudan Armed Forces have broken the siege on two other cities in an area of the country outside Darfur called the Kordofan. And now they are taking the fight back to the RSF. The effort to reach a negotiated settlement to the war is still ongoing by the international community through a process that has been called the “quad” because it involves four countries.
But meanwhile, it has largely been theater because the RSF has no intent to reach a humanitarian truce. And now the Sudan Armed Forces, after having basically been losing for the better part of a year since recapturing Khartoum and Omdurman now has no initiative to negotiate with the RSF because they’re gaining the upper-hand militarily. The fact of the matter is that civilians are continuing to suffer from immense food insecurity—what’s known as integrative phase classification Level 5, which is the highest level of food insecurity in several areas of the country, while others have the extremely difficult designation of IPC Level 4, including in areas outside Darfur, the Rapid Support Forces with the attack on El Fasher and the subsequent massacre involving the use of an earthen wall to trap the population has been found by the UN fact-finding mission as of last month to have committed genocide in El Fasher.
Last week, we released with NASA, a report based on almost two years of research that found that the Rapid Support Forces intentionally caused famine and mass starvation in El Fasher and North Darfur by burning agricultural communities to force farmers to plea to miss a planting season. And we were able to show the destruction of 41 communities and the subsequent mass collapse of farming capacity in those communities. And so that helped confirm the UN’s findings of intentional starvation as part of a campaign of genocide against the Fur in Zaghawa ethnic people who live in the area surrounding El Fasher. So the situation is changing rapidly, but it continues to be a battlefield that largely is defined by mass suffering of civilians.
MELINDA TUHUS: Nathaniel Raymond, we’ve been talking about Sudan, but I’m also hearing about recurring violence in South Sudan, which is a huge country that seceded from Sudan in 2011. And unfortunately, there’s been a lot of violence there almost from that time. What can you tell us about what’s been going on recently?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Now it looks like the Nuer Dinka conflict is about to explode again. I served in the UN mission South Sudan as an adviser to the Department of Peacekeeping operations for mass atrocity early warning in 2015. And so I know South Sudan well and have worked on South Sudan on and off for 15 years. And so I’ve already been receiving panicked calls from the ground, including from members of the Christian community there who are worried that this next round of large-scale violence could meet and exceed the killings in 2013, which displaced thousands and killed thousands. And so the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab is trying to figure out what we can do to be ready to assist on South Sudan because we know that area so well and because our methods could bring unique information, particularly early warning information of potential arson attacks on communities of different ethnic groups, not just Nuer and Dinka.
There are many subtribes and many large tribal groups with different subtribes as part of it in South Sudan, which would be affected by any return to war between the Dinka and the Nuer. And so we’re figuring out what we can do and we’re getting ready to assist.
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