Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and allied militias killed “at least thousands of people” in West Darfur state, an international rights group has said, in what it called apparent “crimes against humanity” and “genocide.”
In a report published on May 9, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that RSF attacks on the Masalit tribe and other non-Arab groups between April and November 2023 were some of the worst atrocities in the ongoing civil war which started that April.
The attacks in el-Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, saw entire neighborhoods housing primarily displaced Masalit communities looted, burned, shelled, and razed to the ground. The campaign that amounted to “ethnic cleansing” left hundreds of thousands of people as refugees, HRW said in its 186-page report.
Sudan descended into chaos in April 2023, when long-simmering tensions between the Sudanese Armed Forces, led by General Abdel Fattah Burhan, and the RSF, led by Mohamed “Hemedti” Dagalo, broke out into street battles in the capital, Khartoum.
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