Sudan Refugees: Second Wave of Ethnic Purge

Agencies – Sudan Events

Earlier this year, Arab forces waged a campaign of killing and rape that expelled most of the ethnic-African Masalit tribe from the Sudanese city of El Geneina. This month, they returned to finish the job.
In early November, fighters led by Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) sought out members of the Masalit community for killing, dozens of survivors told Reuters. The focus: Ardamata, an outlying district in El Geneina, capital of West Darfur state.
The RSF and its allied Arab militias then intensified their attacks on civilians living in a camp for internally displaced people in Ardamata and in surrounding neighborhoods, launching an assault on many of the tens of thousands of people living there, most from the darker-skinned Masalit tribe.
Dozens of survivors of this month’s attacks spoke to Reuters. Many of them described seeing Masalit men rounded up and shot. Some said they saw people being hacked to death with axes and machetes. Hundreds were taken to a soccer field in the area, where two eyewitnesses said they saw people being executed by Arab captors. Bloated corpses lay in the streets of Ardamata for days. Homes were burned and looted, some stripped bare as looters made off with TVs, kitchenware, and even doors and windows.
The attack on Ardamata comes after the RSF, a paramilitary force drawn mainly from Arab tribes, and allied Arab militia forces earlier this year drove hundreds of thousands of El Geneina’s former Masalit majority out of the city. In a campaign that lasted almost two months, Arab forces killed hundreds of residents of El Geneina, most of them members of the Masalit tribe. Many of the survivors fled to Chad.
It’s unclear how many Masalit remain in El Geneina. In 2022, the multiethnic city had a population of 540,000, according to UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency. In the wake of this year’s fighting in Darfur, almost half a million Sudanese refugees now live in camps on the Chad side of the two nations’ border.
The European Union estimates that more than 1,000 Masalit were killed in Ardamata. Josep Borrell, the EU’s chief diplomat, said earlier this month that the “latest atrocities” in Ardamata were part of “a wider ethnic cleansing campaign conducted by the RSF with the aim to eradicate the non-Arab Masalit community from West Darfur.”
The Sudanese army did not respond to questions about the RSF’s advances or the conduct of its forces.
The RSF and Arab militias didn’t respond to questions about the witness reports of killings and looting in the latest fighting.
In a statement on Nov. 13, an RSF spokesperson blamed the Sudanese army for the fighting. The group’s commander, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, had ordered a probe into what happened in Ardamata, and would “not provide any protection to any individual proven to be complicit in any violations of innocent civilians’ rights,” the statement said.
Dagalo, known as Hemedti, has made similar statements before. After the earlier violence in El Geneina, he said the RSF would investigate.