Sudanese Militias Are Committing Genocide in Darfur—Again

The United States has the power to halt ongoing atrocities in El Fasher.

People watch as fighters of the Sudan Liberation Movement, a rebel group active in Sudan's Darfur State, attend a graduation ceremony in the southeastern Gedaref state on March 28. [AFP | GETTY IMAGES]

“If you were Masalit, we decided that we don’t want to leave any alive, not even the children.” This explicit warning, recounted by a survivor to Human Rights Watch, by a militiaman of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and its allies last June is emblematic of the ongoing genocidal atrocities in Darfur. Rarely does the world bear witness to such open confessions of genocidal intent.

The RSF is the successor to the janjaweed militia, which carried out a genocide in Darfur just 20 years ago against non-Arab ethnic groups such as the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa. At the time, a mass movement emerged in the United States—led by the Save Darfur coalition, which comprised nearly 200 organizations—mobilizing worldwide protests and bringing out prominent celebrities, including then-Sen. Barack Obama and George Clooney, and demonstrators in the hundreds of thousands.

A powerful U.N. Security Council arms embargo, sanctions regime, and referral to the International Criminal Court ensued, resulting in the first—and only—arrest warrant for genocide against Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir, while an eventual joint U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force was dispatched to the region; it was later withdrawn in 2021.

This time, the world is nowhere to be found. The U.N. Security Council has passed only a single resolution after nearly a year into the conflict, merely calling for a temporary cessation of hostilities during the month of Ramadan—a step that should have been taken on day one.

Many RSF commanders today are former janjaweed leaders themselves, including the head of the RSF, Mohamed Hamdan “Hemeti” Dagalo. The RSF largely recruits on an ethnic basis from Arab communities, whose militiamen have continued to perpetrate systematic massacres and sexual violence against non-Arab communities on the basis of their ethnicity.

The current genocide unfolding in Darfur is crowded out by coverage of Gaza, Ukraine, and the broader war in Sudan, portrayed as an internal armed conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the RSF. But the ethnically targeted violence in Darfur must be distinguished from this broader conflict, demanding an immediate response in the form of civilian protection.

This is all happening in the context of a shamefully overlooked humanitarian catastrophe. The estimated death toll currently is as many as 150,000; nearly 9 million Sudanese have been forcibly displaced; and 25 million people—half of Sudan’s population—are in need of humanitarian aid. In the worst scenarios, 2.5 million people are projected to die by famine, while 18 million face acute food insecurity, and nearly 4 million children are acutely malnourished. It is a man-made disaster of inconceivable proportions.

In recent weeks, the RSF has razed dozens of communities to the ground at a shocking pace around El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur. The city’s population of up to 2.8 million, including 750,000 children, is already on the brink of famine with nowhere to go. The long-feared attack on El Fasher is now well underway, and the window to intervene to protect civilians is closing.

THE LEGAL COMMUNITY is already coalescing around a consensus that the RSF campaign in West Darfur constitutes genocide. As human rights lawyers specializing in atrocity prevention, we chaired the first international inquiry into the genocide with dozens of jurists and scholars around the world, concluding that the RSF is responsible for committing genocide in Darfur.

Our panel of experts included founding prosecutors of the international criminal tribunals and presidents of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. The United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect echoed our independent finding, which is further corroborated by a substantial report by Human Rights Watch on the RSF’s ethnically targeted campaign of genocidal violence.

Our inquiry also concluded that the RSF is receiving direct military, financial, and diplomatic support from the United Arab Emirates. This finding is also backed by the U.N. Panel of Experts on Sudan, who found credible evidence of the UAE providing heavy weaponry to the RSF, as corroborated by further investigative reporting. In December 2023, a group of U.S. members of Congress sent a letter to the Emirati foreign minister urging an end to the UAE’s provision of military support to the RSF. This May, legislation was introduced to stop U.S. arms exports to the UAE until it ceases its support to the RSF.