{"id":9694,"date":"2023-12-30T15:37:46","date_gmt":"2023-12-30T15:37:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/?p=9694"},"modified":"2023-12-30T15:37:46","modified_gmt":"2023-12-30T15:37:46","slug":"sudan-refugees-second-wave-of-ethnic-purge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/2023\/12\/30\/sudan-refugees-second-wave-of-ethnic-purge\/","title":{"rendered":"Sudan Refugees: Second Wave of Ethnic Purge"},"content":{"rendered":"

Agencies – Sudan Events<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.
\nIn early November, fighters led by Sudan\u2019s 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.
\nThe 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.
\nDozens of survivors of this month\u2019s 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.
\nThe 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\u2019s 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.
\nIt\u2019s 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\u2019s agency. In the wake of this year\u2019s fighting in Darfur, almost half a million Sudanese refugees now live in camps on the Chad side of the two nations\u2019 border.
\nThe European Union estimates that more than 1,000 Masalit were killed in Ardamata. Josep Borrell, the EU\u2019s chief diplomat, said earlier this month that the \u201clatest atrocities\u201d in Ardamata were part of \u201ca wider ethnic cleansing campaign conducted by the RSF with the aim to eradicate the non-Arab Masalit community from West Darfur.\u201d
\nThe Sudanese army did not respond to questions about the RSF\u2019s advances or the conduct of its forces.
\nThe RSF and Arab militias didn\u2019t respond to questions about the witness reports of killings and looting in the latest fighting.
\nIn a statement on Nov. 13, an RSF spokesperson blamed the Sudanese army for the fighting. The group\u2019s commander, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, had ordered a probe into what happened in Ardamata, and would \u201cnot provide any protection to any individual proven to be complicit in any violations of innocent civilians\u2019 rights,\u201d the statement said.
\nDagalo, known as Hemedti, has made similar statements before. After the earlier violence in El Geneina, he said the RSF would investigate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) sought out members of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":9695,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9694"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9694\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9696,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9694\/revisions\/9696"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}