Sudan paramilitaries massacre hundreds of refugees in Darfur

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Hundreds of people in Sudan have been killed and thousands forced to flee after the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces attacked two refugee camps in the country’s Darfur region, targeting civilians in acts that activists said amounted to genocide.

Eyewitnesses near the besieged city of El Fasher, the only big city the RSF does not control in Darfur, accused the predominantly Arab militia of executing humanitarian workers and of targeting people, mainly Zaghawa, based on their ethnicity in the famine-hit Zamzam camp and nearby Abu Shouk camp.

Relief International said RSF paramilitaries had killed its entire staff of nine at Zamzam’s last remaining medical clinic. “We have learned the unthinkable that nine of our colleagues were mercilessly killed including doctors, referral drivers and a team leader,” it said in a statement. “This is a profound tragedy for our organisation.”

Clementine Nkweta-Salami, UN Resident and Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Sudan, said at least 300 people had been killed in the latest attacks.

Shayna Lewis, a Sudan expert at Preventing and Ending Mass Atrocities, an NGO, said the massacre risked turning into “another Srebrenica”, referring to the mass killings of 8,000 mainly Muslim men and boys in a UN-designated “safe area” of eastern Bosnia in July 1995.

The latest onslaught in a war that has caused the world’s worst humanitarian disaster comes as the UK, EU, African Union and others host a conference in London that aims to protect civilians and begin a diplomatic process to end the two-year-old war.

David Lammy, the UK foreign secretary, said on Tuesday the UK would pledge an additional £120mn in aid for Sudan.

But donors have so far committed a fraction of the $4.2bn called for by the UN, obliging it to scale back its ambitions to $2.35bn to meet “the direst needs”, Tom Fletcher, UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, wrote in the Financial Times.

Erika Guevara Rosas, Amnesty International’s senior director for research and advocacy, said the world should be ashamed for “turning away while Sudan burns”.

Some 13mn people have been displaced and tens of thousands killed since the RSF and the Sudanese military began fighting in April 2023, triggering a war that has engulfed virtually the entire country.

In a lightning campaign, the RSF made early battleground victories, capturing the capital Khartoum and forcing the government to decamp to Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast. But in March, the Sudanese Armed Forces retook most of Khartoum and the RSF has since fallen back on its Darfur stronghold.

Diplomats say they fear a permanent partition of the country, the third largest in Africa even after South Sudan broke away in 2011.

The US state department has accused the RSF of committing genocide, saying that it had “systematically murdered men and boys — even infants — on an ethnic basis, and deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence”. Washington has also accused the SAF of war crimes, though has stopped short of alleging genocide.

Neither of the warring parties has been invited to London. But activists have criticised the UK for inviting the United Arab Emirates, alongside 19 other states, for the talks in Lancaster House.

The Sudanese government has accused the UAE of bankrolling and arming the RSF, while previous reports by a UN panel of experts also cited “credible” evidence that the UAE had supplied the paramilitary group.

“The foreign secretary is walking into a PR disaster as he hosts the UAE at the ministerial conference whilst the UAE-backed RSF commits another Srebrenica in North Darfur,” Lewis said.

The UAE has consistently denied backing either side in the war, calling SAF’s accusation an attempt to distract attention from its own atrocities. Most recently, reports from Khartoum suggest SAF soldiers carried out revenge killings of anyone suspected of collaborating with the RSF.

“We have consistently urged both sides to agree to an immediate ceasefire, disengage from hostilities and restore a civilian government,” the UAE said in a statement. “Our only interest is to achieve a lasting peace that puts an end to the suffering of the Sudanese people.”

Additional reporting by Chloe Cornish in Dubai