The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in war-torn Sudan have unleashed yet another depopulation campaign in the towns and villages of Gezira state, killing hundreds, looting, raping, and burning crops in the country’s breadbasket amid a famine that has engulfed over half the population.
“Never in modern history have so many people faced starvation and famine as in Sudan today,” according to UN experts. “Severe levels of hunger” affect more than 25 million people, including 97% of the over 11 million internally displaced people (IDPs). Along with the over three million others who have fled to neighboring countries, 30% of Sudan’s population has been displaced.
Adding to the largest displacement crisis in the world, the wave of attacks since October 20 has forced another 135,000 people to flee from the eastern region of the state, the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported on November 1.
The RSF, a paramilitary organization that has been at war with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) for over a year and a half, invaded Gezira in December 2023. Attacking more than 2,000 villages this February, it had brought agriculture to a near halt in this state whose Nile-watered fields were producing over half of all Sudan’s wheat.
Most of these villages in the western vicinity of the Hasahisa, one of the main towns in the central part of Gezira, remain deserted, said Jamal (name changed) spokesperson of Hasahisa’s Resistance Committee (RC).
A network of RCs across Sudan was spearheading the mass protests against the military junta jointly led by the SAF and the RSF, before the allies turned on each other, hurling the country rocked by revolutionary turmoil into a civil war in April 2023. Since then, the RCs have been organizing and coordinating relief and rescue efforts for civilians caught in the war which has claimed well over 62,000 lives, according to a conservative estimate.
Gezira was a safe haven for those fleeing the fighting in the capital region of Khartoum, until the RSF’s invasion late last year. Following the attacks in February, the eastern area was the only safe region, Jamal said. Its market towns of Rufaa and Tamboul were “serving as the main suppliers of food for the entire state.”
The areas under attack in Gezira are expanding. On October 31, the RSF invaded homes, seized vehicles, looted gold and money, and gave residents a 24-hour ultimatum to desert the village of Mustafa Al-Qureshi in Al-Halawin.
The UN’s Secretary-General “is appalled by reports of large numbers of civilians being killed, detained and displaced, acts of sexual violence against women and girls, the looting of homes and markets and the burning of farms,” his spokesperson said on November 1.
That day, RSF depopulated another village in Al-Halawin, before launching attacks on other localities including Al-Kamlin and Hasahisa to the west and northwest of Tambul. Across Gezira, a total of 120 villages have been affected by RSF attacks since October 20, according to a joint statement by the RCs of Hasahisa and Rufaa on November 1.
