Fighters from a paramilitary group and allied Arab militias massacred more than one thousand civilians in an attack on a town last week in Sudan’s West Darfur region.
Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and its allied militias attacked Ardamata, a camp for displaced people, after they attacked a nearby military base.
Over the course of several days, more than one thousand civilians were killed. Some estimates have put the number killed at greater than 2,000.
The fighting comes after a civil war erupted in the country in April between the RSF and Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). The two groups were aligned in the past until “its outgrown influence and the ambitions of its leader, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, put the two sides in direct confrontation,” The New York Times reported. The war erupted after Hamdan and SAF military chief Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan removed a transitional government in 2021 with a military coup.
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The RSF engages in “the massacre of civilians, ethnic killings, and use of sexual violence,” according to the U.S. Treasury Department.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said in a statement, “These latest atrocities are seemingly part of a wider ethnic cleansing campaign conducted by the RSF with the aim to eradicate the non-Arab Masalit community from West Darfur, and comes on top of the first wave of large violence in June.”
The EU said that there were “credible eyewitness reports (that) more than a thousand members of the Masalit community were killed in Ardamta, West Darfur, in just over two days, during major attacks carried out by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and its affiliated militias.”
Among the atrocities being committed were reports that young girls were being raped in front of their mothers, according to the AFP.
مقطع يظهر أفراد من مليشيا الدعم السريع المتمردة، وهي تمارس التعذيب والتصفية الجسدية والتطهير العرقي لمواطنين عزل في مدينة اردمتا بالجنينة بدعوى انتمائهم لقبيلة المساليت، بعد اقتحام منازلهم الآمنة.#السودان pic.twitter.com/sK1mgaiBk2
— Sudan News (@Sudan_tweet) November 5, 2023