Investigators at the Centre for Information Resilience have verified over 180 fires affecting more than 100 villages, towns and cities since the start of the war in April 2023. One expert said events in Darfur bear the hallmarks of ‘ethnic cleansing’.
US-Africa policy expert Cameron Hudson said the current RSF activity in Darfur is ‘ethnic cleansing’, including war crimes ‘that some people will call genocide’ – reminiscent of the atrocities of 2003-05’.
‘What the RSF [Rapid Support Forces] is doing has felt very similar to what they did in a previous generation as the Janjaweed [a Sudanese Arab militia group that the RSF grew out of], in terms of who they’re targeting and how they are targeting them’, explained Hudson, Senior Associate for the Africa Program at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
‘One of the things we assessed at the time was that they were doing things like burning villages, poisoning water sources or destroying livestock to prevent people from ever returning.’
More than 8.4 million people have been forcibly displaced since the start of the conflict in April 2023, equivalent to one in six people living in Sudan.
[Photo: Cyril Ramaphosa welcoming Rapid Support Forces (RSF)’s General Mohamed Dagalo – @GovernmentZA]