Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been blamed for the assassination and mutilation of a senior government official, amid growing reports of mass killings in the restive Darfur region in the country’s devastating war.
Khamis Abdallah Abbakar, the governor of West Darfur, was murdered this week just hours after he gave an interview to a Saudi-owned TV station in which he criticised the RSF and described a “genocide”.
The UN said “compelling eyewitness accounts attribute this act to Arab militias and the RSF”, while the Darfur Lawyers Association condemned the act of “barbarism, brutality and cruelty”.
Sudan’s war entered its third month on Thursday with a reported death toll now above 2,000, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project’s latest figures, which cover fighting until 9 June. The true numbers of dead and injured is likely to be several times higher.
The conflict pits the army, headed by Sudan’s de facto leader, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, against the RSF, commanded by his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, an ex-warlord from Darfur who is also known as Hemedti.
Burhan accused the RSF of the “treacherous attack” in Darfur. The paramilitaries denied responsibility and said in a statement they condemned the “assassination in cold blood” of Abbakar, who was killed after being abducted from RSF protection, which “the governor had requested”.
Abbakar was from the Masaleet ethnic group, which has been targeted in recent weeks. Many Masaleet judges, lawyers, doctors, teachers, aid workers and other professionals have been killed in what appears to be a systematic effort to murder potential leaders.
Abbakar was the head of the Sudanese Coalition Movement, an armed group in Darfur, that was a signatory to the Juba peace agreement in 2020, which brought a fragile peace to the region.
The Sudan analyst Kholood Khair of the Khartoum-based thinktank Confluence Advisory said in a tweet that the “heinous assassination” was meant “to silence his highlighting of genocide … in Darfur”.
Khair added that it was unclear “what the red lines are any more” and urged for international “action to protect the people of Darfur and elsewhere”.
The killing comes after US and Saudi mediation efforts were suspended after the collapse of multiple ceasefires amid flagrant violations by both sides.
Darfur, one of the war’s main battlegrounds, was already scarred by a two-decade conflict that left hundreds of thousands dead and more than 2 million displaced.
Dagalo’s RSF have their origins in the Janjaweed militias which the former authoritarian leader Omar al-Bashir deployed against ethnic minorities in the region in 2003, drawing charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Homes and markets have been burnt to the ground, hospitals and aid facilities looted, and more than 149,000 people sent fleeing into neighbouring Chad.
The Umma party, one of Sudan’s main civilian groups, said El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur state, had been turned into a “disaster zone”, and urged international organisations to provide help.
The Darfur Lawyers Association reported that “cross-border militias supported by the RSF” had carried out “massacres and ethnic cleansing” in El Geneina.
The Masaleet suffered massive violence and displacement when they and other black African communities in Darfur rebelled in 2003 over decades of political and economic marginalisation by elites in Khartoum.
Residents of El Geneina said the army and the police had armed the Masaleet people to fight the Arabs who took their lands.
“There have been more than 100,000 refugees crossing to Chad, and several dozen injured by firearms. They also describe several hundred injured, possibly blocked in Geneina and other locations, and they also testify on the dangers of the roads to Chad, with targeted attacks on militias on those trying to cross the border,” said Jérôme Tubiana, a veteran independent researcher on Darfur.
“That level of violence unfortunately is not unprecedented in West Darfur, and reminds us of the most intense period of the attacks by both government forces and militias in 2003, exactly 20 years ago, and even before that. With the difference that today there is no clear decision-maker in Khartoum who could be pressured to stop the violence – it is much more chaotic.”
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said about 6,000 people have fled El Geneina to take refuge in the town of Adré in eastern Chad over the last few days. On Wednesday, 32 people were brought to Adré’s hospital, including four women and four children, mainly from Tendelti and El Geneina. Dozens more were admitted today, MSF said. Most of the injuries are gunshot wounds.
More than 100,000 Sudanese refugees have reached eastern Chad. The crisis has driven 2.2 million people from their homes, including 528,000 who have fled to neighbouring countries, says the International Organisation for Migration.
MSF have called for the so far limited humanitarian response to be scaled up “to respond to their most pressing needs while supporting as well the communities who host them and the thousands of refugees already in the region”.
