As war ravaged the Sudanese capital last month, it quickly spread to the western Darfur region, reigniting an old conflict and sending a wave of refugees across the border into Chad, Portal reports.
Nasr Abdullahi sent his wife, sister and five children to Chad last week and stayed to await news of a 17-year-old son in the capital, Khartoum. But when his neighbor’s house burned down and gangs took to the streets, he too fled.
“I couldn’t take it anymore, so I decided to set off on foot,” the 42-year-old said after arriving exhausted on Wednesday in the Chadian city of Adre, some 27 km from El Geneina, the western state’s capital Darfur.
“I crossed the bush and walked west all night.”
Residents attribute the renewed violence in El Geneina and other parts of Darfur to the power struggle between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Khartoum, which has allowed the area’s militias to run rampant.
People interviewed by Portal said the attacks had been carried out in El Geneina since late April by Janjaweed militias. These are gunmen believed to belong to nomadic Arab tribes who travel on trucks, motorcycles and horses, the same militias that gave rise to the RSF.
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The RSF denies instigating the violence in Darfur, blaming the army instead.
The attacks in El Geneina paralyzed markets, electricity and medical facilities, according to eyewitnesses, and evoked memories of the appalling violence that erupted in the early 2000s.
According to the Sudanese Ministry of Health, up to 510 people have died in this city of almost half a million people. At least 250,000 people from West Darfur have been internally displaced and another 90,000 have fled to Chad.
With communications with El Geneina cut off, Abdullahi’s account offered a rare glimpse into the chaos.
“Heavy weapons and machine guns are fired everywhere. When you go out in the morning you see new bullet holes in the walls,” he said, adding that the city he left had water supplies cut and food shortages.
territorial conflict
The feared Janjaweed militias first rose to power when the government used them against rebels in Darfur two decades ago. More than 300,000 people died and 2.5 million were displaced.
From them the RSF emerged and developed into a large paramilitary force with legal personality. Its commander, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, became deputy chairman of Sudan’s Governing Council after helping to overthrow former leader Omar al-Bashir during a popular uprising in 2019.
Although the conflict in Darfur is often portrayed in ethnic terms, pitting Arab tribes against non-Arabs, it is also rooted in a struggle for land, exacerbated by climate change.
“This is a matter between the shepherd and the farmer. This is about resources and land,” said Sultan Saad Bahreldin, chief of the Masalit tribe, the largest block of El Geneina residents.
According to Jerome Tubiana, a researcher for the region, during Darfur’s droughts in the 1970s and 1980s, Arab herders migrated to less arid areas, which created tensions.
They gained more land when the Janjaweed helped government forces push back rebels in the conflict beginning in 2003.
However, they felt that the 2020 peace deal with some rebel groups, which promised the return of the displaced to their country, ignored their needs. With the departure of the international peacekeeping forces, the attacks increased.
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Five residents of El Geneina, most of whom chose to remain anonymous to avoid reprisals, testified over the phone before the lines were cut that they believed the militias intended to evacuate the town and that the army had done little to to provide protection.
“They enter the houses and shoot”
Instead, Masalit gunmen and members of the Sudanese Alliance, the group that signed the peace accord, are fighting in the neighborhoods where they live.
“The militias attacked everyone present in the city, although they initially targeted the Masalit tribes. Even the Arab residents were not safe,” said Mohamed Aldouma, a former governor of the state and a member of the Darfur Bar Association, a human rights advocacy group.
Lawyer Jamal Abdallah said some witnesses told him about an incident in El Geneina in which seven people were killed in a house and another in a makeshift clinic where 12 people had already been injured and a doctor shot dead.
“The Janjaweed are entering the houses and shooting,” added Abdallah, who said he could see bodies and dead animals scattered on the street.
Three people living in El Geneina told Portal they saw attackers in beige RSF uniforms.
In the past, the RSF has reprimanded individual soldiers for their involvement in Janjaweed attacks, but has accused the army and allied militias of being behind recent violence in Darfur.
In an audio message earlier this week, Hemedti, who comes from an Arab tribe, urged the people of El Geneina to “reject regionalism and tribalism. Stop fighting among yourselves immediately.”