Sudan’s war is 2 years old and there are no signs of slowing it down

The RSF attack on the El Fasher displacement camp: State of the art in Sudan and a desperate attempt to arm a humanitarian agency

Relief International’s regional director for Africa said it was a brutal and deliberate assault on health facilities. “Very sadly, nine of our humanitarian colleagues — these are dedicated doctors, ambulance referral drivers and our area team leader — were executed while carrying out life saving work for some of the most vulnerable people in Sudan.”

On Sunday an RSF spokesperson, Al Fatih Qurashi, said the RSF had taken over the camp, and said it had harbored fighters aligned with the Sudanese Armed Forces. Widespread reports by local rights groups detailed some of the worst atrocities perpetrated during the current war had occurred inside the camp. Aid workers from Relief International rounded up and executed refugees, as well as other people.

The executive director of the Yale research team said that the RSF had faced no significant consequences for mass atrocities. The Zagawa, the Fur and the Masalit will be prepared to slaughter non-Arab black African civilians if they do not get any international help.

Evidence of the RSF’s attack on the Zamzam was found in satellite footage. Images indicated that more than 200 armed pick-up trucks, known as “technicals” had swarmed the camp between April 11 and April 14, and the camp’s main market had been torched to the ground during that period.

The group said most of those deaths occurred inside two aid camps. One of them, called Zamzam, is the largest displacement camp in Sudan and had hosted more than half a million people, with a famine inside the camp declared last year. The U.N. recently said between 60,000 to 80,000 households in the camp had been displaced by the recent fighting and had fled into the center of El Fasher, or the surrounding desert.

An El Fasher resident asked not to be named told NPR the situation was extremely difficult and hundreds of thousands of displaced people were crammed into the city’s streets. “Right now, even in my own house there are more than 100 women and children,” said the resident, adding that those still out on the streets are surviving “without water, without food, without health services — and unfortunately no one is asking about them, no one is taking care of them.”

Two years on and the Sudanese army has managed to wrest back control of the capital Khartoum. The city used to be a pleasant place, now it is a shadow of it’s former self. Health services have collapsed, the capitals airport and many major landmarks destroyed, the national museum systematically looted. Much of the city is rubble.

Last week Sudan’s military led government initiated a case against the UAE at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in which it accused the Arab nation of being complicit in a genocide against African ethnic groups, perpetrated by the RSF and several allied Arab militias.

The U.K., France and Germany are cohosting Wednesday’s conference, but have not invited either of the warring factions themselves; the Sudanese Armed Forces — widely considered to be the de-facto government — and its erstwhile paramilitary partners, known as the Rapid Support Forces — or RSF.

There has been little international action to address the impact of the war. International donors have so far only committed a fraction of the money called for by the U.N. for Sudan.

The foreign ministers from 20 countries are in London Tuesday as part of an effort to restart the peace talks in Sudan, which broke down two years ago. The United Nations says the conflict has prompted the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, and the most devastating famine in decades.

The facts are well documented. Hundreds of thousands of people are suffering from famine in Sudan, which is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. 15 million people have been forced to flee their homes because of the country’s largest displacement crisis.

The worst of that genocidal violence is in the western Darfur region. Over the last few days the violence has spiraled. More than 300 people, have been killed in two major displacement camps near El-Fasher city in the western Darfur region, as the RSF launches a major assault on the last state capital in Darfur under the control of the Sudanese army.

The U.K.’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy stated in his opening remarks that many have given up on Sudan. That is wrong…. We simply cannot look away.” But so far, it seems that the world has.