Sudan’s RSF take over El Fasher amid reports of mass atrocities

As we foreshadowed, Sudan’s notorious ‘Rapid Support Forces’ (RSF) militia is now TikToking footage of itself committing atrocities in Darfur’s city of El Fasher.

Recap: the RSF technically formed in 2013, but was really a re-brand of the notorious ‘Janjaweed’ used by Sudan’s Islamist ex-dictator (al-Bashir) against Darfur in the 2000s.

By the time a popular uprising ousted Bashir in 2019, the army and RSF were frenemies, jointly toppling Sudan’s transitional authority then signing an uneasy power-sharing pact.

But that imploded spectacularly in 2023, triggering a civil war that’s now left ~150,000 dead, 12 million (a ~Belgium) displaced, and 30 million (an ~Australia) needing aid.

And that’s where Darfur’s El Fasher city comes in — it was the military’s last Darfur stronghold, so the RSF started a siege there 18 months ago with a 50km sand wall.

That siege broke on Sunday, and the RSF is now inside the wire, resuming the ethnic cleansing it’s been perpetrating for a quarter-century. And don’t take our word for it — RSF members themselves are boasting about it online, with one guy alone (Brigadier-General Al-Fatih Abdallah Idris) gleefully shooting multiple civilians at a time.

The victims? El Fasher is now (like the RSF and broader Sudan) overwhelmingly Muslim — the city’s last Christian pastor reportedly fled last month, and the last Catholic priest was shot dead in June. So the massacres are now more along ethnic lines, with the Arab-majority RSF targeting local African ethnicities like Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit.

Again, don’t take our word for it: psychos like Idris above literally film themselves asking civilians their tribal affiliation before shooting them. His RSF colleagues even went and massacred several hundred more locals at two hospitals this week. The scale of death in El Fasher is so big, Yale researchers have even shown you can literally see it from space.

So what’s the world doing about this?

The RSF leader (‘Hemedti’) says he’s opened an investigation, which is weird because he said the same thing back in August when Idris was already filming his own atrocities. That investigation should’ve taken Hemedti about 30 seconds to fire up his TikTok account and look with his own eyes, and yet there was Idris still at it this week.

So you’ll forgive our cynicism when we mention Hemedti just released footage purporting to show Idris being taken to jail.

Meanwhile, the UN Security Council extended its arms embargo on Sudan just last month, and yesterday reiterated it won’t recognise the RSF’s parallel regime. The UN’s main humanitarian arm (OCHA) also launched a $6B appeal back in February, and guess how that appeal is now tracking? It’s barely at 25%.

The US hosted indirect talks with both sides (ie, never in the same room) in DC last week in hopes of progressing to formal ceasefire negotiations, but the two sides are way apart.

And those negotiations are meant to be backed by an international ‘Quartet’ (the US, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE), but you’ll forgive our cynicism on that front, too: there’s evidence (denied of course) that the UAE has been supplying the RSF with arms (including Chinese drones) in hopes of securing influence over vast Sudanese terrain that’s rich in…

• gold (historically exported through Dubai)
• agriculture (the UAE has ~none), and
• strategic value (right on the Red Sea). 

Meanwhile, Egypt and others (like Turkey and Pakistan) have sided with Sudan’s military, who it must be said aren’t exactly saints either.

Intrigue’s Take

There’s an old cartoon where someone gets to the pearly gates and asks God why he didn’t stop all the suffering, and God replies: “I was going to ask you the same thing”.

There’s no law of physics preventing us from stopping the above atrocities, or any others. It’s really just a law of human will, which gets us to the ‘Problem from Hell’ chronicled by a Pulitzer-winner who later became a US ambassador: it’s about mankind’s tendency towards depravity, coupled with the (US-led) world’s tendency towards inaction.

The above book focuses particularly on US inaction, not necessarily because the US has been uniquely inactive, but more because the US has had uniquely global reach. But as we’ve been charting for a while now, that US-backed world order is now on the defensive, retreating more towards a world where each major power dominates its own region.

And sorry to be such Debbie Downers on a Friday, but history suggests the result might be a world prone to even more human depravity, and even more international inaction.

Sound even smarter:

• There’ve been 35 coups and attempted coups since Sudan’s 1956 independence.
• There are long-standing International Criminal Court warrants out for former dictator al-Bashir (81) on genocide and other charges. Sudan’s military is still holding him at a medical facility in the country’s north.
• Earlier this month, the ICC convicted one of al-Bashir’s Janjaweed (RSF’s predecessor) commanders over his role in the Darfur scorched-earth campaign that left hundreds of thousands dead two decades ago.