https://www.theguardian.com/global-deve ... dan-darfur
Zeinab Mohammed Salih in Adré
First published on Fri 10 Jan 2025 06.44 EST
Refugees tell of attacks on darker-skinned people and non-Arab groups by Rapid Support Forces and its allies in Darfur
Husna Ibrahim Arbab had already lost her son in the early days of Sudan’s civil war – burned to death in his tent after it was set on fire – when she was apprehended by militia aligned with the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group while fleeing west towards the border with Chad.
A bullet flew by close to her head, the 24-year-old said. Five male relatives were separated from the group she was travelling with, taken to a creek, and shot in the chest.
“If you are black, you are finished,” is how Arbab described her experience of the ethnically targeted violence that has swept through Darfur for the second time this century.
Accounts of massacres perpetrated by the RSF and allied Arab militias emerged shortly after war broke out in April 2023 between the RSF and the regular army, the Sudanese Armed Forces, and its allied groups. Much of what the outside world has learned about the atrocities has been relayed by survivors from refugee camps in Adré, across the border in Chad.