RSF Militiamen Accused of Looting in Wad Madani

Agencies – Sudan Events

The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have looted everything: cars, lorries and tractors”, laments a resident of a village in al-Gazira state, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from the paramilitaries as they push southwards into war-torn Sudan.
The villagers of Al-Gazira hold their breath every time they hear the roar of a car or motorcycle engine, so fearful are they of the dreaded RSF paramilitaries nestling aboard.
The bloody war that has pitted the Sudanese army against the paramilitary RSF in Khartoum for the past eight months has driven half a million people to seek refuge further south, in this agricultural state that until recently had been spared the violence.
But recently, the paramilitaries attacked Wad Madani, forcing more than 300,000 people to flee again, within the state of Al-Gazira but also to the neighbouring states of Sinnar and Gadarif, according to the UN.
Since then, the paramilitaries have continued their relentless descent southwards. They were spotted “15 kilometers north of Sinnar”, 140 kilometers south of Wad Madani.
Since the surprise start of the conflict on April 15, the army led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has mainly played its air trump card: it is the only one to have combat aircraft.
Everywhere they go, women and girls fear “sexual violence, a recurring threat” in Sudan, says the NGO Save the Children.
On the Hasahaisa market, the doors of the stalls are open and the goods that did not interest the looters are spread out on the ground, an AFP journalist observed.
At another market, Tamboul, halfway between Khartoum and Wad Madani, paramilitaries charged into the market firing indiscriminately.
According to the UN, the conflict has claimed 12,000 lives, a figure that is surely greatly underestimated given the extent to which whole swathes of the country have been cut off from the rest of the world.
It has also displaced 7.1 million people, including 1.5 million in neighbouring countries, said Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for the UN Secretary-General, describing “the largest displacement crisis in the world”.
The UN Security Council expressed “concern” at the intensification of violence in Sudan, while “strongly condemning” attacks against civilians and the extension of the conflict “to areas hosting large populations of displaced persons”.
So, says Rabab, who has also hidden her surname, when the paramilitaries “fired bullets in front of the house before entering, we all panicked”.
“They only left after searching every room,” she told AFP.
Al-Tayeb, a resident of a village near Hasahaisa, was surprised when the paramilitaries asked him “a strange question: they wanted to know how I got the money to build my house, inherited from my father and built 35 years ago”