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Darfur: A War Within a War

Jérôme Tubiana

A group of SLA-AW fighters and civilians attending a flag-raising ceremony, Rokero, Sudan, October 2024

1.

In February 2004, a year after the rebellion broke out in Darfur, government-backed Arab militias known as the Janjaweed (“devil horsemen”) attacked Tawila, a town in North Darfur province. Nestled in the foothills of the Jebel Marra massif, Tawila is fed by watercourses that farmers draw from to cultivate tumbak (chewing tobacco), mostly for export to the Nile Valley. The Janjaweed surely had one eye on its wealth. A month later the United Nations reported that militiamen had not only plundered the town but raped more than a hundred women and girls, including some forty high school students.

Ismail, a thirty-nine-year-old man from Darfur’s main non-Arab community, the Fur, was attending a different high school in Tawila then. He remembers hearing from other witnesses that Musa Hilal, the paramount leader of the Janjaweedwas himself present and presiding over the violence. That day Ismail and some of his schoolmates fled over forty miles east on bicycles to El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur. Civilians poured there from all over the state, seeking shelter in three hastily established refugee camps: Abu Shok, Al-Salam, and Zamzam.

All three camps remain crowded today: the Darfur genocide is generally dated from 2003 to 2005, but war never really stopped. For over two decades the Janjaweed and their successors have attacked rural areas, preventing internally displaced Darfuris as well as refugees in Chad from returning to their farmland—not least around Tawila, where there have been so many rounds of violence that it’s hard to keep track of the dead. Among the most violent episodes was in 2010, when the Janjaweed executed dozens of men at the market at nearby Tabara. At Tawila’s main cemetery, which is hidden in the outskirts of the town, grass covers unmarked tombs that look like (and sometimes have become) anthills. The rebel supporters—some of whom were only children when their elders started the Darfur rebellion—struggle to remember who is buried where. More than fifty people who were slaughtered in 2010 are said to lie under two long mounds. 

In 2013 the Sudanese junta formed a new paramilitary force named the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), under the command of Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, otherwise known as “Hemetti,” Hilal’s main younger Darfuri Arab challenger. Omar al-Bashir, who had ruled the country since he staged a coup in 1989, initially conceived of the RSF as a praetorian guard that would protect him from his own generals in the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). His trust proved misplaced. In 2018 protests against Bashir’s Islamist junta broke out in Darfur and then spread across the country. The RSF—which by then had grown from 6,000 to some 100,000 men—allied with the SAF and deposed the president. The two military parties then formed a transitional government with civilian figures. 

Jérôme Tubiana

A watercourse flowing through the Jebel Marra massif, Darfur, Sudan, October 2024

This was a hopeful time in the capital, Khartoum, but the “transition” barely registered in Darfur, where RSF domination remained firmly entrenched, unchallenged by civilian politicians. Arab militias attacked camps inhabited by internally displaced Masalit, the main non-Arab community in West Darfur, as well as villages where some had returned, re-displacing some 100,000 in 2021. The same year, Arab nomads who had recently settled near the Kolge mountains, not far from Tawila, burned thirty non-Arab (mostly Zaghawa) villages and displaced some 35,000 people, who fled to Zamzam. Because the RSF is primarily Arab, non-Arabs understandably viewed it as a disingenuous conflict arbitrator. The RSF’s leaders, in turn, conspiratorially argued that the SAF was engineering tribal tensions to keep them busy in Darfur and away from the capital. 

*

Whatever their differences, the RSF and SAF were united in opposing civilian rule. In October 2021 they deposed the prime minister, Abdalla Hamdok, in a coup. Unable to find a new figurehead, they grew increasingly combative, and in April 2023 the two forces went to war with each other on the streets of Khartoum. The non-Arab communities and rebel groups in Darfur hoped that fighting would be contained in the capital—both belligerents were their historical oppressors—and at first most of them remained ostensibly neutral. 

In the months leading up to the conflict, the RSF had ramped up recruitment, mostly among Darfuri Arabs, many of whom joined the war effort in return for pursuing their own Arab supremacist agenda. Soon Arab militias allied to the RSF were targeting Masalit civilians in El-Geneina, the capital of West Darfur. Masalit self-defense forces and rebel groups resisted for nearly two months, with little support from the SAF. The RSF eventually took over the city in June 2023, forcing most of the Masalit to flee; they walked away in long columns. Arab fighters shot at men who were leaving or hiding in their houses. 

When the RSF attacked Tawila the same month, part of the modest local SAF unit defected. Ismail—who moved almost nomadically between Abu Shok and Tawila—was home when the assault began. They arrived on “horses and cars full of ammunition and started shooting at people,” he told me when we met in Tawila last October. Two of his uncles and a cousin were killed. “We found the bodies and buried them in the middle of the night, when Janjaweed were not around, before leaving for Abu Shok.” (Like many Darfuris, Ismail uses the term “Janjaweed” to refer to all Arab militias, including the RSF.) For nearly two months, Arab forces looted Tawila, burning what they could not take and killing civilians who resisted. There was a set schedule: fighters fired shots in the air in the morning and again in the evening to signal the beginning and end of the pillage.

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All of Tawila’s residents fled, mostly to El-Fasher. As the town emptied, it might have seemed ripe for an RSF takeover—but the Arab fighters were content with looting. Then, in August, to everyone’s surprise, guerrillas from a long-absent rebel faction, the Sudan Liberation Army wing under-Abdel-Wahid al-Nur (SLA-AW), regrouped and conquered the ghost town. Ismail and a handful of civilians who returned helped the rebels collect the remains of eighty-five people and hastily bury them. 

Jérôme Tubiana

Ismail and his friends saying prayers at fresh graves at the cemetery outside Tawila, Darfur, Sudan, October 2024

Ismail showed me a grave on a roadside in the heart of town. Sixty bodies had been recently laid to rest. “We buried the abandoned bones near where we found them.” Nearby, in the middle of the road, were two tombs marked with heaps of stones and branches. Cars drove around them. Yet another mound holds the remains of seventeen civilian victims from June 2023: ten men who were executed, four women who resisted rape, and three children killed in shelling. Ismail was at the scene. “I ran away,” he said, “but I could hear the voices of those who were captured.”

2.

The SLA was officially formed in 2003 by a small group of non-Arab rebels—mainly from the Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit communities—under the leadership of Abdel-Wahid. The earlier year they had stolen weapons from a local police station in Golo, West Jebel Marra. Their agenda was both to protect their communities from the SAF and Arab militias and to join the larger mobilization of armed groups in Sudan’s peripheries against the elite in Khartoum. In April 2003 the SLA spectacularly destroyed SAF aircrafts and helicopters parked at El-Fasher airport. But despite a few such victories, they fragmented along ethnic lines and personal rivalries.

Most of the SLA-AW fighters were Fur, but even that ethnic faction splintered. In the last years of al-Bashir’s rule, annual RSF campaigns pushed the surviving guerillas further up the Jebel Marra highlands. Like many other armed groups, they largely relocated to Libya and made a living as mercenaries. In 2023, shortly before the war began, the SLA-AW’s chief of staff, Yusif “Karjakola” (“disabled,” named for his crippled hand), sensed an opening and brought his troops back to Darfur, apparently on some three hundred armed pickup trucks. 

I had last met Karjakola fifteen years ago in Chad. He looked very different when I saw him again last October in a village on the Jebel Marra massif, where his troops had billeted. (They were drying meat on their machine guns’ cannons.) His trademark rebel dreadlocks were gone. “We became old and our hair turned white,” he told me. “We came from Libya in difficult times. People informed us Tawila was deserted and dead bodies were scattered around. We sent a force to town and called the displaced to return if they wanted.” 

Jérôme Tubiana

A makeshift grave for two victims, Tawila, Sudan, October 2024

The SLA-AW has reconquered all the area it lost in Jebel Marra since 2003. The rebels have also gained new territory, including Tawila (which they had only controlled for a few days in November 2004). They did not have to fight to enlarge the “liberated areas,” which are now about the size of Delaware. Rather, they simply entered and took over, facing no resistance from the SAF and RSF, who were busy fighting each other in Khartoum and other central theaters of battle. By October 2023, however—perhaps feeling that holding western Sudan would strengthen their hand in negotiations—the RSF turned its attention back to Darfur, swiftly capturing four cities: Nyala, Zalingei, Ed-Da’ein, and then Ardamata near El-Geneina, where an SAF garrison was based. Having routed the soldiers, the RSF and allied Arab militias carried out further mass killings of Masalit civilians, massacring up to 2,000 and displacing 10,000 more to Chad.

By November, El-Fasher was the only major city in Darfur still holding out. Hemetti’s deputy and elder brother, Abderrahim Daglo, held a meeting with representatives of local non-Arab rebels. (These parties are distinct from the SLA-AW. In 2020 they signed a peace agreement with the transitional government, before deploying forces in El-Fasher.) Accounts of the encounter differ. The RSF announced that they would collaborate to expel the SAF and then share control over the city. The rebels denied any such arrangement and recommitted to El-Fasher’s defense, warning the general public that the RSF would repeat similar massacres in El-Fasher as they had in El-Geneina. Some leaders even announced that they were “abandoning neutrality” and deployed their forces alongside the SAF in Khartoum and the Nile Valley. After a brief and unsuccessful assault on El-Fasher, the RSF turned to the strategic Gezira province, between the two Niles south of Khartoum. 

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The resistance in El-Fasher gave a breath of air to the SAF, which began regaining ground in central Sudan. Some observers even argued that the tide was turning. In Gezira a local RSF commander defected (back) to the SAF, which led to a retaliatory campaign against the local population, in which over 1,000 were reportedly killed and 340,000 displaced. Later in January, when the SAF retook Gezira’s capital, Wad Medani, militias loyal to the army targeted civilians accused of supporting the RSF. In March 2024 the RSF—perhaps stung that a ragtag force was holding them at bay—began shelling El-Fasher and burning non-Arab villages around it; in April they besieged the city and launched ground operations against it as well as Abu Shok. 

Jérôme Tubiana

The SLA-AW’s chief of staff, Yusif Karjakola, Martal, Sudan, October 2024

*

Since then El-Fasher has become the second epicenter of the war—or rather an epicenter of a second war, one being waged not between the SAF and the RSF but, like twenty years ago, between Darfur’s Arab and non-Arab communities. At first glance the rebels seemed hopelessly outgunned. Outside observers like the US Special Envoy for Sudan predicted the city would fall. Last June, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2736 demanding the RSF to “halt the siege of El-Fasher,” but to no effect.

Against all odds, however, the rebels and armed civilian allies have held out, in possibly the first resistance of this kind since the war began. Old rebel groups (and some SAF units) have been joined by self-defense forces from non-Arab communities, under labels such as Khashin (“rough”). The civilian mobilization has inevitably drawn retaliatory ethnic violence. Last November, at a press conference, RSF representatives declared that anyone who takes up arms becomes a legitimate enemy target. More extreme threats, some directed at specific non-Arab communities, are making the rounds on social media. 

Ismail returned to Abu Shok before the siege. Rather than join the self-defense forces, he volunteered in the camp’s “emergency response room,” whose members distribute aid. (Such cells have emerged all over Sudan since the war, in the near-total absence of foreign aid. Last year they were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.) They helped displaced families find shelter in schools, cooked food in the takiya, or communal kitchen, and brought the wounded to the two hospitals still open. Ismail witnessed more than twenty RSF hit-and-run attacks; often gunmen drove by on motorbikes, shooting at civilians on their way. In April a shell fell on a private clinic, killing seventeen people, mostly children. Their “bodies were so scattered we had to use their clothes to try identifying them,” he told me. 

Jérôme Tubiana

An SLA-AW checkpoint outside Tawila, Darfur, Sudan, October 2024

In May RSF drones bombed a school sheltering more than sixty families, though fortunately no one was killed. Ismail knows of some fifty people who were kidnapped by the RSF, including his fifteen-year-old cousin. The emergency room paid ransoms up to $4,000 to release some of the hostages. Many others have disappeared; people in El-Fasher fear that the RSF forcibly enrolled them. 

Ismail estimates that between April and July the RSF shelling killed some 250 civilians and injured over two thousand in Abu Shok. (That month he decided to return to Tawila; his family no longer had enough to eat.) To expel the RSF, SAF planes also indiscriminately bombed some neighborhoods across North Darfur. Survivors in El-Fasher were surprised to see SAF officers coming afterwards to apologize, blaming the RSF for mysteriously diverting their rockets. 

3.

The tagatu (“junction”) is a spot on the main road between Tawila and El-Fasher where a thin strip of bare earth visibly links the silhouettes of two hills on the horizon. Everyone I spoke to in Tawila said that militarized Arab settlements lie at the foothills of both Jebel Kusa in the north and Jebel Kolge in the south. For twenty years Arab militias from the northern outpost have launched raids on the road and surrounding areas. 

Since June 2024 the SLA-AW has opened the road—the RSF was reluctant about this—for a few hours every Friday. A dozen or so rebel pickup trucks mounted with machine guns gather at the tagatu to dissuade attacks on the civilian traffic and aid convoys. A fighter with binoculars keeps watch on the Arab outpost of Jebel Kusa. The SLA-AW contingent waits until sunset, helping repair or tow civilian vehicles; they may also take pedestrians on board. If stragglers fall behind, Arab militias are likely to attack them.

Jérôme Tubiana

A car carrying displaced civilians from El-Fasher arriving at a checkpoint outside Tawila, Darfur, Sudan, October 2024

I drove out from Tawila to the tagatu one Friday morning in late October. A SAF jet circled over Jebel Kusa, its two engines leaving behind contrails. A burnt car and some unexploded rockets lay by the side of the road. SLA-AW officers told me they had destroyed the RSF vehicle that July. “More than fifty RSF cars and a hundred motorbikes came from Kolge and wanted to block the road and loot civilian cars,” one said. “We intervened and defeated them, killing twenty. Six or seven such clashes took place in July and August. All in all, we lost eight martyrs…. Their tombs are in the cemetery you visited.” He noted that the RSF initially “did not want this road opened and created obstacles. We opened the road by force to support the people of El-Fasher with food.” A stream of trucks with flour and charcoal for cooking passed by all morning. 

A few hours later I drove back to the SLA-AW checkpoint, around a mile outside Tawila. Soon after, the first civilians began to arrive from El-Fasher: they came in cars, pickups, minivans, and trucks of all sizes, even donkey carts. Dozens of women and children crammed into the large beds of lorries, while men perched on the cab. (They were probably not among the city’s poorest, who are likelier to stay put—the invisible majority across Sudan simply cannot afford to move.) Some people arrived with no more than the clothes on their back; others carried beds, chairs, bikes, goats—anything they could salvage from their homes. A few of the trucks had an armed rebel escort. At the checkpoint, the newcomers were welcomed by SLA-AW soldiers tasked with collecting taxes, as well as hawkers selling lollipops and peanuts.

I met forty-five-year-old Hattom, who had travelled from Zamzam with her youngest daughter, on their donkey cart—the journey took them two days. It’s not the first time she has been displaced. In 2003 the Janjaweed drove her from her village near Kolge to a camp for internally displaced people (IDPs) near Tawila. When the RSF attacked the area in 2023, she relocated to Zamzam, finding shelter in a school hosting up to a hundred families. In July 2024 she and her family traveled to Tawila to cultivate a farm, agreeing to pay a third of the harvest to the landlord. 

Awaiting the crop, they sometimes went up to two days without eating. Hattom showed me what they survived on: ambaz (residue of peanuts grounded for oil), gamfut (shelves of grain left at the mill), and tamaleka leaves (an amaranth bush). Hunger drove them back to Zamzam, where they begged relatives for food. But the situation there had, if anything, gotten worse: the communal kitchen was overwhelmed and prices had risen threefold in a year. Hattom described the situation in Zamzam bluntly: “without money you die.” That is why she was returning to Tawila for the next harvest.

*

In January 2024 Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), with which I work as an adviser, randomly sampled over six hundred children under the age of five in Zamzam. Nearly a quarter of them were acutely malnourished. In April, right before the full-scale assault on El-Fasher, MSF did a mass screening of 46,000 children there and found malnutrition levels at nearly 29 percent. In July, mainly based on this data, the Famine Review Committee (FRC) of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification concluded that famine in Zamzam was “plausible” and that “similar conditions [were] likely prevailing” in Abu Shok and El-Salam. That made Zamzam the only place in the world which the FRC deemed to be under famine—the third such declaration of this kind in its two-decade-long history. In September another MSF screening of 29,000 children in Zamzam revealed that the situation had not improved: over 34 percent were malnourished. The situation is hardly better in the rest of Darfur: MSF found similar numbers in Tawila.

Jérôme Tubiana

Hattom carrying wild plants for consumption, Tawila, Sudan, October 2024

The easiest entry points to Darfur are through the Chadian border, which the RSF mostly controls. (That is how I reached Tawila.) As Joshua Craze, Kholood Khair, and Raga Makawi have shown in these pages, the World Food Programme (WFP) views “the SAF as Sudan’s legitimate government and seeks its authorization for all aid delivery; it fears being thrown out of the country otherwise.” 

Last March the SAF again declared this border off-limits, accusing the Chadian and Emirati governments of jointly running arms to the RSF from there. Some NGOs have persisted nevertheless—but the UN complied. In August the SAF “reopened” the border (which, to restate the obvious, it did not control). Over the next five months, according to its own figures, the UN sent 870 trucks of food aid across the Chadian border, but only forty-two of them made it to Zamzam. MSF estimates that over 8,000 tons of food are needed each month to feed Zamzam, which is Sudan’s largest IDP camp, hosting as many as half a million people. That is roughly four hundred trucks per month; El-Fasher likely needs as many. At the end of September, after the RSF held up two of its trucks carrying medicine and therapeutic food at a checkpoint for three months, the NGO suspended its Zamzam nutrition program. 

*

Six schools in Tawila have been requisitioned to host IDPs from El-Fasher. At the time of my visit, they were housing some five hundred families. The women sleep in the classrooms; the men, who are fewer—most stayed back to guard their homes—sleep outside, except when it rains. Halima arrived at the Oussama Ibni Zeid school last May from El-Fasher and was now the site’s supervisor. She seemed to know everyone. “Every family has its own story,” she told me. “Every family has its own deaths from the war, or natural causes.” She introduced me to a widow in charge of a dozen orphaned nephews and nieces. Halima’s own nephew had recently arrived at the school, after looking in vain for his parents in Zamzam. 

Halima also volunteers at the Tawila hospital, which the RSF did not spare when it ransacked the town in 2023. There was nothing left but broken windows and furniture by the time they were finished; three cars were left burned in the courtyard. The staff had to buy medical equipment in remote rural markets, often without knowing where it was sourced from. (The material might well have been stolen.) The hospital reopened in November 2023.

Jérôme Tubiana

A group of displaced children from El-Fasher attending class at the Um al-Muminin school, Tawila, Sudan, October 2024

Every Sunday children under the age of five are screened for malnutrition. Staffers from a local NGO measure the circumference of their mid-upper arm and give the “severe” cases—those who are thinner than 11.5 centimeters—weekly rations of a peanut-based therapeutic food known as Plumpy’Nut. The Sunday I visited there were nearly two hundred such cases, forcing the team to halve the rations. They hoped aid trucks would reach Tawila before the following Sunday.

A few children with extremely severe malnutrition are admitted to intensive care with their mothers. Among them was two-month-old Ahmad, who weighed less than nine pounds. His mother, Huda, lacked milk to breastfeed him. She left Abu Shok in June, after a series of RSF bombs fell on the market, killing seventeen people, including her cousin; the local nutrition center was destroyed as well. The market nearly closed, raising food prices. “In the evening, those who found work came back with something,” Huda remembered. “The others had nothing until the next day.” Seven months pregnant with Ahmad, she was unable to work. After furtively burying her cousin, she left for Tawila with her six children. 

Huda’s husband sold a solar battery to pay for their journey, but he stayed back to join the self-defense forces. “He didn’t listen to me,” she said. His mechanic’s income had fed the family, who were left to fend for themselves. But he felt compelled to fight: sheikhs (community leaders) in the camp were demanding that every family contribute to the defense effort, either with one able-bodied man or, if none was available, with $1 per month. That is as much as a farmworker’s daily wage, but many IDPs have no income at all.

Huda’s family live in an abandoned IDP house in Tawila. They survive on tamaleka leaves. Her three-year-old daughter, Masajid, is severely malnourished too, but she has not received any peanut paste since Abu Shok’s nutrition center closed.

*

Since last May the RSF has shelled El-Fasher almost daily. So far the defense is holding. Except for the RSF’s drones, the SAF has a monopoly on the airspace; it has aerially bombed paramilitary positions within and outside the town but also hit civilians. Fighters have died on both sides, including senior RSF officers—though unarmed civilians likely make up the bulk of the casualties. All the IDPs I met in Tawila told me of losing relatives and neighbors. 

Jérôme Tubiana

A malnourished child receiving treatment, Tawila Hospital, Darfur, Sudan, October 2024

According to the SLA-AW, about 15,000 families, or 75,000 individuals, have left El-Fasher through the Friday corridor since June. Most, however, remain in Tawila because they cannot afford to continue their journey. The town and the rest of the liberated areas remain relatively peaceful—but they are still terribly isolated. The SLA-AW has tried to establish some nonaggression pacts with local Arab and RSF leaders, notably to open roads, but tensions have emerged over the Friday corridor. The RSF does not mind civilians evacuating the city, but they are less happy about supplies of food or medicine going in. 

On Friday, November 22, a month after I left Tawila, RSF troops came to the tagatu, leading to some altercations: shots were fired in the air. The next Friday eight RSF pickups arrived and took pictures of vehicles bringing food to El-Fasher. Since then an RSF force has been semi-permanently positioned around the junction, discouraging movement in both directions. On January 16, as the SLA-AW and an allied rebel faction were escorting vehicles loaded with IDPs from El-Fasher to the Chadian border, the RSF attacked the convoy, killing at least twenty-five people.

Last December the RSF also started shelling Zamzam, which until then had been largely spared. At least eighty-one were killed in two months. On December 24 the FRC declared famine again in Zamzam, as well as in the other two IDP camps nearby, Abu Shok and El-Salam; Tawila is now in “risk of famine.” The SAF rejected the data and suspended their participation in the FRC, apparently convinced that the famine declarations were part of a Western plot against them. Their sense of persecution was probably assuaged on January 7, when the US government categorized the RSF’s violence in Darfur as a genocide and imposed sanctions on Hemetti. But nine days later it placed similar sanctions on the army’s commander-in-chief, Abdul Fattah al-Burhan, and soon after suggested that the SAF had used chemical weapons.

Ismail told me that the freshest tombs in the Tawila cemetery belong to children who died of malnutrition. After sketching a customary prayer in front of them, he said: “They had no other food than grass.”

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