The Forgotten Genocide of the World
A bitter war has been raging in north-east Africa. Since April 2023, Sudan has been embroiled in a violent power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the powerful paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Formed in 2013, the RSF emerged from the notorious Janjaweed militias that fought rebels in Darfur and were responsible for genocide and ethnic cleansing against the region’s indigenous Black African, non-Arab population. This campaign led to the destruction of countless Darfuri villages and the deaths of over 400,000 civilians.
Currently led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, the RSF has consolidated its power through control of Sudan’s lucrative gold mines. The group has allegedly received backing from foreign actors, including Iran and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), who have capitalised on Sudan’s growing instability to advance their own strategic and economic interests.
As of today, the war has claimed more than 150,000 lives and forcibly displaced approximately 12 million people. The remaining population, estimated at 26 million, suffers from widespread hunger, disease, and economic collapse. Sudan now faces what is expected to become one of the most devastating and widespread hunger crises in modern history. Armed groups continue to attack civilians and obstruct humanitarian aid, particularly to the Abu Shouk and Zamzam refugee and internally displaced persons (IDP) camps, once regarded as safe havens, where more than one million people currently reside.
Sexual violence has surged since the outbreak of the war, with RSF fighters reportedly weaponising rape as a deliberate tactic of war. Darfuri women and girls have been subjected to gang rapes, often in front of family members, alongside abductions and sexual slavery. Thus far, at least 221 cases of child rape have been reported, including victims as young as one year old. The scale and brutality of these crimes eerily parallel historical atrocities such as the Rape of Nanjing during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Once again, history repeats itself, revealing humanity’s failure to learn from its past.
Despite the scale of suffering, this humanitarian catastrophe has unfolded largely unnoticed, overshadowed by extensive media coverage of other conflicts such as the Israel–Gaza war, while the international response remains deeply inadequate. Efforts by Washington to act as a peacemaker are constrained by the United States’ close ties with the UAE. Under President Trump, foreign policy priorities and business interests led the administration to bypass congressional oversight to authorise billions of dollars’ worth of arms sales to Abu Dhabi, despite a United Nations embargo on weapons transfers into Darfur. This willingness to overlook mass atrocities reflects a broader pattern in which systems of oppression and large-scale violence are tolerated, or even enabled, in service of wealth and power. As Jean-Paul Sartre once observed, “When the rich wage war, it is the poor who die.”