By Dave Stockton
Widespread reports are coming in of mass killings after Rapid Support Forces (RSF) finally sized control of El Fasher, the capital of northern Darfur, part of Sudan’s huge western region, after enduring a 17 month long siege. The Sudanese government claims that at least 2,000 people have been killed in the city since then.
Aid agencies’ report have credible stories of atrocities. The RSF conducted house to house searches summary executions, rapes of young women, and attacks on civilians trying to escape the beyond the earth wall surrounding the city, put up by the rebels.
Since the war broke out in April 2023, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) has been engaged in a bloody civil war with the RSF. The UN has alleged that war crimes have been committed by both the RSF and the army.
More than 150,000 people have died in the conflict, and about 14 million have fled their homes. Western media have paid less attention to the suffering in Sudan than in Gaza or Ukraine, despite the fact that its casualties have been greater.
The RSF has been driven out of central, western and southern parts of the country, including the capital Khatoum, but it has consolidated its hold on Darfur. It now controls all five sub-state capitals in the region, with its administration in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur.
Genocide
El Fasher was the SAF’s last stronghold in the region and was the refuge of hundreds of thousands of the ethnic rivals of the Arab based RSF, formerly known as the Janjaweed, responsible for an officially designated genocide in the 2000s.
This genocide, against the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups, led the International Criminal Court (ICC) to indict leaders for crimes against humanity, rape, forced transfer and torture. An estimated 200,000 people were killed between 2003 and 2005. Other believe that between 2003 and 2008, there were 300,000 civilian deaths and about 2.7 million civilians driven from their homes.
Darfur is home to 6 million people and numerous ethnic groups, with escalating tensions related to environmental, economic and social factors. The two main communities, one agriculturalists, often designated ‘Black Africans’, and the other semi-nomadic herders, referred to as ‘Arabs’.
The reality is more complex. These rivalries have been exacerbated over the years since Sudan’s independence from Britain in 1955, by Arab Nationalism emanating from Gadaffi’s Libya and by political Islamism from Egypt. From the 1970s severe drought and desertification have led some to regard Darfur as the scene of the first ‘climate change conflict’, thus inflaming ethnic tensions groups.
But the wars in Darfur are not simply internal. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says, ‘The problem is not only the fighting between the army and the Rapid Support Forces, but also the growing external interference that undermines prospects for a ceasefire and a political solution.’
He did not name any specific country, but the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have repeatedly been accused of supplying the RSF with weapons. However, the UAE also deals with the Khartoum government, as does Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and China, all eager to invest in port facilities on the Red Sea as well as to grab a share in Sudan’s rich gold reserves.
Indeed British-made small-arms target systems and engines for armoured personnel carriers have been recovered from combat sites. The findings have again prompted scrutiny over Britain’s export of arms to the UAE.
On the other hand even before the war RSF leader General Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, sent his forces to the conflicts in Yemen and Libya. He now controls some of Sudan’s gold mines, allegedly smuggling it to the UAE. Libya’s General Khalifa Haftar has also been charged with aiding the RSF by smuggling weapons into Sudan.
Half a revolution
But the immense suffering of the last two and half years of civil war are also the end result of the failure of the Sudanese Revolution of 2018-19. Huge street protests, led by workers, students and with a major role played by women, demanded an end to 30-year rule.
These lasted for eight months and saw general strikes and mass demonstrations calling for democracy. Attempts at bloody repression – including the 2019 massacre in Khartoum, in which over 100 died – before eventually the army mounted a coup to oust al-Bashir and divert the revolution.
A joint military-civilian government under Abdalla Hamdok took office, though scarcely power. But the popular forces failed to build workers’ councils and popular power, or to break the hold of the generals over the rank and file soldiers.
In short to stop the democratic revolution becoming permanent, the counterrevolution struck back. Another army coup overthrew Hamdok’s government in October 2021.
The same thing had happened in Egypt in 2011. Mubarak was ousted, to be replaced after an election, by first by the civilian Islamist president Mohamed Morsi. But then in 2013 the democratic forces wrongly supported another coup, assisting a return to power of the military under Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
In Sudan the coup was staged by the very men responsible for the 2019 massacre, and who today are at the centre of the current fighting – the head of the SAF General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his then deputy Dagalo.
It was al-Burhan’s plans to incorporate the 100,000-strong RSF into the army and remove Dagalo from command, that triggered the civil war, with the RSF seizing much of Khartoum until the army regained control of it almost two years later in March 2025.
The terrible sufferings of the people of Sudan today show that if a democratic revolution does not break up the repressive forces of the capitalist state and replace this with the armed power of working people, it will face a bloody counterrevolution.
The point is to learn these lessons and prepare for the next time. Revolutionaries are undoubtedly in the midst of organising aid, medicine, food, water and safety in the refugee camps and occupied areas, and reconstructing neighbourhood committees where they can. But they also need a communist party, built on a programme for permanent revolution.
