At least 200 people are now known to have died in West Darfur in the latest attack on civilians and local forces blamed on Janjaweed militia. Darfur, the semi-arid western region of Sudan where a vicious civil war erupted in 2003, has seen a new outbreak of fighting over the past few months as rival groups clash over water and grazing land, shortages of which are being exacerbated by the climate crisis. Eight people were killed on Friday and more than 200 on Sunday in and around the city of Kreinik. By Monday fighting had spread to the regional capital, El Geneina, between the Sudanese government’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the notorious paramilitary group headed by Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, and a local militia called the Sudanese coalition forces, headed by Khamis Abdullah Abakar, the governor of West Darfur and former rebel leader. Medical sources in West Darfur told the Guardian that they had been overwhelmed by casualties.
Just before the attack in Kreinik on Sunday, mobile networks went down across West Darfur, a familiar feature ahead of a major assault by the Janjaweed, who were largely incorporated into the RSF. People reported seeing planes flying low over the city before; moments later, about 150 pickup trucks of the RSF and other cars with no identification arrived carrying gunmen. Hub Eddin Wadi, an assistant pharmacist in Kreinik hospital, said there was a shortage of medical staff to take care of the numbers of wounded and dead. “I expect that the death toll will rise, because there are many wounded people who are still bleeding and many of them [have] the bullets … still inside them,” he said. “There’s not enough medical staff here to take care of them.” Wadi blamed the RSF for the brutality. “They have removed the town from the Earth—more than 90 percent of the houses have been burned out,” he said. “They even killed the animals that people brought [with] them around the hospital to protect them.”
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