Terror Returns to Darfur: Only American Pressure Can Stop the Killing in Sudan

[SS from essay by Alex de Waal, Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation and co-author of Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy: The Promise and Betrayal of a People’s Revolution.]

On October 26, a horrific massacre rapidly unfolded in North Darfur as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—one of two main factions in Sudan’s brutal two-and-a-half-year civil war—captured its capital, El Fasher. The world has finally turned its eyes toward this genocidal war, thanks to videos taken and circulated by the killers themselves. The unedited, close-up footage is too sickening for television and newspapers to show. But pools of blood can be seen from satellites in space. At just one hospital, according to the World Health Organization, fighters murdered 450 patients and health-care workers as well as their family members. The official death toll from the city’s occupation has risen to over 1,500, and thousands more civilians are missing.

Survivors have made their way to Tawila, a once sleepy town 45 miles west of El Fasher, where aid agencies such as Doctors Without Borders and the International Rescue Committee provide small quantities of assistance, and some protection is afforded by a rebel group that has thus far managed to stay neutral. Every child reaching Tawila’s clinics is malnourished. This week, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification’s Famine Review Committee (FRC)—the premier multinational body that assesses hunger worldwide—declared a famine in El Fasher and its environs.