Issue No. 94

Darfur within Sudan and El Fasher under siege

Darfur has always sat uneasily within the Sudanese state, a frontier of the early mercenary, mercantile, exploitative capitalism that formed the country. In the decades since independence in 1956, with minimal economic output and occupied by 'African' tribes, governance of the periphery was too often a violent afterthought of Khartoum's Riverain elite-- a region to suppress or exploit rather than govern. And the Darfurian identity—or identities—within the region itself have long been contested as well, comprising part Sahelian tribes, such as the Rizeigat, and part indigenous Darfurian groups, including the Zaghawa, Masalit, and Fur. These twin, unresolved crises, of Darfur within Sudan and the one of Darfur itself, have played out on a grand, destructive scale within the civil war that erupted in April 2023. Today, the epicentre of these crises is El Fasher.

Centuries of migration by Arab pastoralist herders led to these communities settling across parts of the region's drier north and the south, resulting in land competition with Darfur's indigenous farming communities. In turn, the region's delicate social fabric began to break down in the 1980s as competition between these arrayed groupings intensified, driven by drought and Khartoum's sustained neglect. Eventually, cyclical, destructive conflict culminated in the devastation of 2003-2005, which saw over 300,000 predominantly indigenous Darfurians die. In these years, Darfurian rebel movements were brutally suppressed by a coalition of Arab militias known as the 'Janjaweed' (devils on horseback)-- the forebears of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)--  who were handed armaments and carte blanche by Khartoum to burn, kill, rape, and pillage their way across Darfur. 

Amid the conflagration of the mid-2000s, El Fasher became host to hundreds of thousands of internal refugees of the rampaging Arab tribes that laid waste to Darfur-- a region named after the historic Fur sultanate. It was the base from which a delayed international response was mobilised under global pressure, while the sprawling IDP camps on its outskirts transformed into cities fed by diminishing foreign aid. But the underlying questions and problems that have plagued Darfur and its place within modern-day Sudan were never resolved. And in the years before the current, most destructive war in Sudan's history broke out, there were clear signs that something remained deeply awry in Darfur. 

A cautious peace may have largely held in the 2010s, but a tense balance endured between the signatories of the Juba Peace Agreement (JPA)—a deal that divvied up power and positions among the indigenous Darfurian rebel elite —and Hemedti's RSF base. Hemedti is the progeny of the Darfur crisis, a notorious Janjaweed commander and a member of the Rizeigat tribe, part of the transnational, nomadic Baggara people. One of the most adept political-military entrepreneurs in Sudan's complex web of politics, Hemedti was gradually adopted into the capital with the RSF as the praetorian guard of Omar al-Bashir. Separate from the formal security architecture-- epitomised by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) Commander Abdel Fattah al-Burhan-- Hemedti was to be the president's 'protector,' though he inevitably turned on al-Bashir in April 2019. But as a result of Hemedti's control over the two most profitable enterprises in Sudan —mercenaries in Yemen and the gold of Darfur —he became immensely wealthy, at one point boasting that he could deposit USD 1 billion within the Central Bank. His economic network in Darfur included not just the gold mines coveted by the Gulf today, but everything from road construction companies to limo services. Yet reconciliation between the broad groupings of the 'Arab' and the 'African' components of Darfur never materialised, and even as the UN peacekeeping mission rolled down in the early 2020s, signs of enduring tensions and sporadic clashes were readily apparent. 

And so with the eruption of war in Khartoum in April 2023, the RSF picked up where the Janjaweed left off two decades ago, laying waste to towns and villages across much of Darfur, including El Geniena and Nyala. A fundamentally economically extractive coalition, Arab militias rampaged across the western region, plundering anything of worth and setting ablaze what remained. Army soldiers abandoned the Darfuris, and while the JPA forces of Minni Minawi and others initially stayed on the sidelines, the scale of the violence against their constituents dragged them into an alliance with the Sudanese army. But there remains no great love between the increasingly Islamist-defined Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the JPA signatories, and the pain of El Fasher is heaping fresh pressure on the alliance. 

For the months after the war began, a wary ceasefire largely held over El Fasher, though hundreds of thousands of displaced people were driven to the city and the nearby Abu Shouk and Zamzam camps. But with aid only trickling-- or entirely prevented-- from entering the region by the Sudanese army, recognised as sovereign by the UN, and looted en route to the cities by the paramilitaries, disease and hunger increased. And in April 2024, the dam broke with the paramilitaries looking to seize control of the last regional capital in Darfur not under their control and consolidate their grip on Sudan's western region. With the RSF having been dislodged from Wad Madani and, of course, Khartoum, the concurrent strategic importance of El Fasher has grown-- at immense humanitarian cost. But strains within the RSF's Arab militias have also risen, particularly due to the heavy costs of fighting and the dwindling number of towns and cities left to loot and fill their pockets.

Since fighting in earnest began over the city, El Fasher has borne witness to dozens of battles as the RSF has repeatedly sought to seize control. Backed by SAF, El Fasher is being defended by the Joint Forces, a coalition of Darfurian former rebels that are majority ethnic Zaghawa. They have watched the RSF's brutality against the Masalit in West Darfur early on in the war, and fear similar events if El Fasher were to fall, particularly with the Arab paramilitaries having lost so many men in the savage fighting. Encircled by the RSF, the siege is almost medieval in nature, apart from the high-tech weapons and drones that are being deployed to the battlefield that Gulf patrons have sourced. Though SAF and Egyptian warplanes have strafed RSF positions outside El Fasher, the bombardments have also diminished with influxes of anti-aircraft weaponry to the paramilitaries.

Much of the city has been destroyed after months of indiscriminate bombardment. A ring road of concentric armed circles, with deep trenches, has been dug, some of which are deep enough for entire technicals to defend the army's 6th Infantry Division headquarters situated in the heart of El Fasher. Meanwhile, assault after assault by the RSF has been thrown into the meat grinder, now with the purported involvement of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-North following their alliance with the paramilitaries.

For those civilians still in the city, life has become a living hell, with starvation and cholera rife. Residents have been reduced to eating animal fodder and ambaz, the peanut residue typically fed to animals after their oil has been extracted. Images of emaciated children from the city-- with humanitarian access nearly wholly severed-- have been widely shared on social media. Most of the hospitals in the city lie in ruins, either looted or struck with shells. And nearly all surrounding settlements have been razed around El Fasher, burnt to the ground by the RSF in the past 18 months. Civilians attempting to flee towards Abu Shouk and Zamzam have been routinely attacked on the roads out of the city, which are also nearly all controlled by the RSF-aligned militias.

Time and again, it has appeared that the RSF was on the cusp of taking control of El Fasher, only to be beaten back by Zaghawa fighters catching them in a pincer movement. But the pressure has been mounting, and it may be that the coalition of forces defending the city will buckle under the pressures of starvation and sustained bombardment. In early June, the RSF seized strategic Joint Forces positions on the Libyan border, opening up new supply lines for arms and fighters to increase further pressure on the city. Meanwhile, Sahelian fighters from Chad, Libya, and even Colombian mercenaries have been documented in the fighting, either financed from the plunder of Darfur, the Kordofans, and Khartoum or from their Gulf patrons. 

Amidst the brutal fighting, bombardment, and rising hunger, hundreds of thousands have been displaced again, mainly into the nearby sprawling camp of Zamzam– where famine was first officially declared last year. While some aid has now been able to reach the camp, the humanitarian situation remains dire, and hundreds of civilians have been killed by paramilitary raids into Zamzam. Dozens of Zaghawa in Abu Shouk near El Fasher-- a displacement camp first erected two decades ago-- were gunned down earlier this month by the RSF as well. And across Darfur, the closure of USAID has slashed funding for the Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs), one of the most effective and cost-efficient food delivery methods, many of which had been borne from the neighbourhood resistance committees of the 2019 revolution. Since the start of the war, the international community's response to the fighting has been muted at best, with attention trained on Gaza and Ukraine. Only a fraction of the UN's humanitarian plan for Sudan has been funded, minimal pressure has been brought to bear on the Gulf patrons sustaining the principal combatants, and all sides have seen that they can commit atrocities with impunity.

Though fighting is still raging, Sudan is already bearing down on a de facto partition, making any dormant peace tracks far more complex-- the US has recently made some moves to restart a latent process with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. But the hope that a detente or a space for negotiations might emerge with SAF retaking Khartoum has not emerged. And for the RSF 'government' with Hemedti as president, controlling El Fasher is deemed as critical to its claims as a 'legitimate' authority. But for those starving and being bombed in the city, they are facing the all-too-real possibility of being massacred if the RSF can break the Joint Forces' concerted resistance. Once protected, what is unfolding in El Fasher is the tragic culmination of a crisis that has been decades in the making, and one that will shape Sudan for generations to come.

The Horn Edition Team