After October 7, 2023, most of the world came to a new understanding of evil. The images of desecrated and charred bodies, grasses strewn with blood and abandoned belongings, a running soundtrack of screams at the hands of Hamas. But violence speaks every language, and the horrors unfolding in Sudan rival the nightmares of this century’s worst massacres. And without the weight of the Western world, their slaughter is only the beginning. The situation, the United Nations warns, is spiraling out of control.
The horrors, so gruesome that even American news outlets cannot look away, are “visible from space” — blood pooling on the ground, piles of human remains, lines of terrified people who could be next. After a year and a half of fighting, the city of El Fasher, which had been the last stronghold of the Sudanese military, fell — unleashing a wave of Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militants on the hundreds of thousands of innocents inside the city. As the sand wall around the city was toppled, armed men opened fire on the local people, mowing down helpless men, women, and children as others videotaped the rampage. “They would ask a man to run,” one survivor said. “Once you start running, they shoot you.”
“It was like a killing field. Bodies everywhere and people bleeding and no one to help them,” Tajal-Rahman told the Associated Press after he escaped to a nearby town. “Some people were run over by vehicles,” reiterated Saeeda, a 28-year-old woman. “While we were on the road, they took girls from our group — choosing them and dragging them away.”
Trapped like caged animals, the locals were lined up and executed. In grisly footage uploaded by the RSF fighters, the carnage is chilling. “One, filmed near the berm, shows dozens of bodies on the ground and fighters with RSF insignia walking among them as vehicles burn nearby and sporadic gunfire pops off in the background. ‘We killed them,’ the man who took the video, which has been verified by NBC News, can be heard saying. ‘They are just dust now.’ Another shows an RSF commander, whom NBC News has identified as Abu Lulu, shooting at a line of men sitting on the ground.”
In eerie echoes of Hamas, the soldiers went door to door through the houses, “beating and shooting” at everyone inside. Some of the worst scenes took place at the city’s only functioning hospital, where the World Health Organization can confirm that more than 460 patients, doctors, nurses, and staff were murdered in cold blood.
For women and young girls, the terror is being caught alive. “At least 25 women were gang raped when RSF’s forces entered a shelter for displaced people near El Fasher University. Witnesses confirm RSF’s personnel selected women and girls and raped them at gunpoint,” Seif Magango, spokesperson for the U.N. human rights office, said somberly.
And there’s no way to know the extent of these atrocities, since the area is under a complete communications blackout. What international aid groups do know is from the small number who escaped. Nathaniel Raymond, the executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, pored over the high-res satellite images, telling NBC News that the “‘activity that suggests mass killing on a level that can only be compared to Rwanda,’ where an estimated 800,000 people were killed in 1994 by armed militias from a rival ethnic group. ‘We have never seen a velocity of violence at this scale,’ he said in a telephone interview Wednesday, adding that his team could see bodies piling up in the streets in satellite images, pools of blood around them.’”
Outside of the children’s hospital, Raymond worried that the images taken on Monday “showed dark dots consistent with people lining up. Nearby, he said, there was a cluster of ‘white objects,’ presumably bodies lying on the ground.
‘We’re in the tens of thousands in terms of all the body-consistent objects on the ground,’ Raymond [shook his head]. ‘They are moving like a wood chipper, and they are killing everything that moves.’”
Surrounded by desert, there is no easy place to run to. While close to a quarter million people were living in El Fasher last August, the United Nations estimated that 62,000 had fled in the week, but only a fraction — 5,000 — had made it the 40 miles to Tawila by Friday. “The arrival numbers don’t add up, while accounts of large-scale atrocities are mounting,” Michel Olivier Lacharité, MSF head of emergencies, worried. “Where are they? Where are the rest? It’s extremely concerning and disturbing,” Doctors Without Borders’s Sylvain Penicaud told The New York Times’s Pranav Baskar by phone. ”Our fear is that these people have been detained for extortion or got killed.” Or, Shashwat Saraf speculated grimly, “We feel that a lot of people are stuck in locations from where it is not safe for them to move, and they need to pay to move, and they don’t have money to pay.”
Most who made it to the town were starving, disoriented, and dehydrated, but others, “including gunshot victims, traveled on foot, hiding by daylight and trekking at night to avoid armed men along main roads,” the Times notes. Top U.N. humanitarian official Tom Fletcher told the Security Council on Thursday that “‘women and girls are being raped, people being mutilated and killed with utter impunity.’ Hundreds who’ve made it to relative safety have untreated bullet wounds, ‘and many bear signs of torture,’” medics are telling relief workers. Scores of children, many who are now orphans, are being picked up and carried to safety by escaping strangers. Thousands are unaccounted for, trapped inside El Fasher, where witnesses describe “widespread executions and routine [shelling].” “If people are still in El Fasher, it will be very difficult for them to survive,” one of the refugee camp organizers warned.
For Sudan, it’s another tragedy in a long history of tragedies. The country’s civil war — long considered one of the worst humanitarian crises in history — was a genocidal bloodbath, a time when the word “Darfur” reverberated across Africa as the darkest of chapters. After a period of brief peace under the transitional government in 2020, the country seemed to be turning a corner — repealing its dangerous apostasy law and inching toward a culture of religious tolerance. Two years later, the nation was plunged back into chaos when fighting broke out between RSF’s leadership and the Sudanese military, reigniting the wave of terrorism against innocent civilians.
Yale’s Raymond “said he feared the paramilitary group, which grew out of the notorious Janjaweed Arab militias that carried out a genocide during the Darfur conflict in the 2000s, was ‘finishing the liquidation of Darfur.’ ‘This is the final battle of the Darfur genocide,’” he warned.
Declan Walsh, the Times’ chief Africa correspondent, knows that today is not the early 2000s. The people of Sudan are hunted as never before. “The first time Darfur tipped into chaos, there was at least some degree of Western pressure. This time,” he writes sadly, “there’s little celebrity activism or political attention, and impunity for abuses is rife. The fighters rampaging across Darfur are armed, organized and funded better than ever. And they are backed by one of the wealthiest countries in the wider region, the United Arab Emirates, which is also a close partner of the United States. (The Emirates has denied backing either side in the conflict.).” Then, Walsh emphasized, “fighters rode mainly on horses and camels; today, they drive armored vehicles and pickups. Before, they torched villages; now, they fire heavy artillery and fly sophisticated drones.”
In April of 2023, when the country began to unravel, church leaders were desperate for help. “We feel forgotten,” they said, even then. “The situation is deteriorating every day, and there is no response from the world. There is a strong feeling of abandonment,” they told Open Doors. “There is no security, no protection. Not from the warring parties or from opportunists who will use this situation to further their own agendas. Christians, churches have been attacked with impunity.”
Walsh notes that President Trump is doing everything he can to stop the killing, even pressing his special advisor in Africa to try to negotiate a ceasefire. “But so far there has been little sign of success. One reason is that participants include diplomats from the Emirates, Egypt and Saudi Arabia — the same Arab powers that are fueling the conflict.” These entanglements only complicate the administration’s work, while families are pinned down, starving, in a town crawling with fighters who want them dead.
Maybe, Senator James Risch (R-Idaho) and others argue, the president could declare RSF a foreign terrorist organization, which would unlock new ways to pressure Sudan to end the slaughter. “That would be a good start,” the editorial board of The Washington Post agreed.
“It’s difficult to imagine the suffering happening there right now,” Family Research Council’s Arielle Del Turco told The Washington Stand, “and difficult to comprehend the scope of the issue with hundreds of thousands of civilians unaccounted for. Christians should pray for a supernatural peace in Sudan, for the protection of innocent civilians, and that people’s hearts would turn to the Lord in the midst of this atrocity.”
Something must be done — before everyone in El Fasher is lost. Just as the United States cannot sit by and watch the brutal savagery against the Uyghurs in China, the Christians in Nigeria, and the Jews in Israel, it cannot turn a blind eye here. Indifference, against this evil, is deadly.
Originally published at The Washington Stand.
Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer for The Washington Stand. In her role, she drafts commentary on topics such as life, consumer activism, media and entertainment, sexuality, education, religious freedom, and other issues that affect the institutions of marriage and family. Over the past 20 years at FRC, her op-eds have been featured in publications ranging from the Washington Times to The Christian Post. Suzanne is a graduate of Taylor University in Upland, Ind., with majors in both English Writing and Political Science.
