Mick Hartley

Christina Lamb – It feels like humanity has died in Sudan.

For a long time, Souad told no one why she cries in the night. “If you tell anyone what I did to you, I will kill you as I did others,” the fighter from the Rapid Support Forces had warned as he brandished a gun and a knife over her small bloodied body.

“I know your house and you see how we kill you people,” he said. Souad had seen. At just 12, she had already witnessed bodies piled on the streets as RSF and other Arab militia swarmed into her home town of El Geneina, capital of West Darfur, in April 2023 at the start of Sudan’s bloody civil war.

Those slaughtered were non-Arabs like them, mostly members of the Massalit tribe to which she and her family belong, so they fled. Her mother fell ill and died, so Souad, her brother and three sisters moved in with their aunt and uncle. Fighting continued to spread from town to town. One day in November 2024, Souad went to the local market to buy falafel to feed her siblings.

“When I got there, it had been taken over by fighters from the RSF,” she says. “One of them grabbed my wrist and pulled me into an empty shop.” He raped her, then issued his warning…

Now 13, Souad, who should be at school playing with her friends, instead sits plucking at the hem of her long black and white dress, eight-month-old baby Suma on her shoulder. A child herself who cries every night, with a baby daughter born of the worst day of her short life.

We meet in the Zahra Centre for survivors of sexual violence, a small shelter of woven grass inside the Spontaneous Camp, started by Zahra Khamis, a Sudanese psychologist whose own 17-year-old son was killed as they fled. Her small volunteer team is helping 350 survivors but that, she says, “is the tip of the iceberg”. The UN estimates that more than half the women and girls arriving from Sudan are victims of sexual violence, many too ashamed to speak….

The situation inside Sudan is even worse. “In all my decades [in the field] I have never seen a bigger gap between the need and what’s being given,” says Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, almost in tears after spending five days inside the country, in Kordofan, the latest frontline in Darfur, meeting civilians who had managed to flee.

Darfur is no stranger to violence. The RSF has its origins in the Janjaweed, a militia that launched a similar spree of killing in 2003-05. That time, celebrities including George Clooney and Brad Pitt got involved. This time is very different.

“It feels like we don’t matter,” says Fuda, 20, as she lifts her orange scarf to show me vivid scars on her right shoulder and right side of her ear. A high school student when the war started, she and her family first fled to Ardamata, a garrison area of El Geneina, where they thought they would be safe. But then the RSF came and they fled again. The first village they got to was being burnt and looted by the RSF and in the chaos of ­running away, she was separated from her mother and siblings.

Speaking so softly I have to lean in, Fuda recounts how a pick-up of RSF fighters blocked her way. “They grabbed me, three of them, and began beating me then as I was lying bleeding, they took turns in raping me.” Left with a broken shoulder and unable to walk, she was eventually taken in by a local woman. When the bleeding did not stop for 21 days, the woman arranged for a driver to take Fuda to Adré, where she spent 15 days in a clinic and was reunited with her mother and one brother who had also made it out. Her other siblings are still missing…..

I’ve said it before, but really, whoever’s doing the PR work for the Arabs is doing a fantastic job. Here they carry on a brutal war of the utmost barbarity against the local black African population that’s been going on for decades – well, centuries – and no one cares. Meanwhile they’re the greatest victims the world has ever seen in Palestine. Hamas showed the same barbarity, with the same sexual violence, against the Jews on October 7th, and they’re the heroes of the western left.