Sudan’s slaughter is the price of a modern scramble for Africa

Imagery from the first source shows blood and bodies staining the sand around the city; the second depicts countless acts of casual murder. In one clip, armed soldiers stand in a ransacked hospital ward strewn with bodies. A wounded man is shot at close range before the camera pans to a courtyard filled with corpses.

According to the World Health Organisation, 460 patients and family members were killed at El Fasher’s Saudi Maternity Hospital. The Sudan Doctors’ Union, a medical group monitoring the conflict, described the scene as a “human slaughterhouse.”

“What happened in El Fasher is like Genghis Khan’s army storming a besieged city and slaughtering it,” says Will Brown, an Africa analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

That contrast is starker when you remember that El Fasher is a place long familiar to Western politicians.

Colin Powell, Kofi Annan, David Cameron, Jack Straw – and, of course, George Clooney – all flew into El Fasher and visited the nearby Abu Shouk refugee camp as they condemned the genocide perpetrated by the Janjaweed, government-backed militias armed and organised under then-dictator Omar al-Bashir 20 years ago.

The Janjaweed later evolved into today’s RSF.

This time, no US secretary of state or Hollywood star is flying in to stop them.

In some ways, says Ahmad Soliman, a senior research fellow of international think tank Chatham House, the massacre in El Fasher is typical of the war between the RSF – which seized power after Omar al-Bashir’s overthrow in 2019 – and Sudan’s regular army.

The fighting, which began in 2023, has continued with no regard for rules of engagement, the protection of civilians or the taking of prisoners.

At another level, it is a grim echo of the genocide of the 2000s, when the Janjaweed – drawn from predominantly Arab pastoralist tribes – brutally suppressed an uprising by largely non-Arab farming communities. For that reason, it was obvious to everyone what would happen if El Fasher fell.

“This is not incidental. This is not RSF troops who have got out of control. This is a systematic policy,” says Shayna Lewis, a Sudan specialist at Avaaz, the US-based non-profit organisation, who had been in regular contact with civilians in El Fasher until it fell. “And this mimics exactly what we saw in the Zamzam refugee camp massacre earlier this year – ethnically targeted killings, particularly of young men.”

Then RSF forces, riding in pickup trucks and backed by artillery fire and drones, stormed the Zamzam refugee camp, a few miles south of El Fasher, just as the British Government convened a diplomatic summit in London aimed at ending the war in April.

During a three-day rampage, at least 400 non-Arab civilians were killed. Witnesses reported males aged 15 and over being singled out, but also described women, children and elderly men being shot. A later inquiry by a local committee investigating the massacre counted 1,500 bodies.

Several witnesses who spoke to the charity Doctors Without Borders said RSF soldiers at Zamzam spoke of plans to “clean El Fasher” of the Zaghawa, the main non-Arab ethnic group.

But the slaughter is not solely about ethnicity, says Brown. It is a proxy war fought not between Africans, but between powerful Middle Eastern – and particularly Gulf – states.

There is no shortage of foreign involvement in Sudan’s war. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) – the official army, which effectively controls much of the country – enjoys backing from Egypt, Iran and Turkey, and, some observers believe, from Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Russia appears to have shifted its support from the RSF – which it initially supplied with air-defence weapons via the Wagner mercenary group – to the SAF, which is offering the prospect of a Russian naval base on the Red Sea.

The biggest player of all, however, is believed to be the United Arab Emirates, though it has denied any involvement.

The United Nations described reports of Emirati support for the RSF as “credible” more than a year ago. On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journalreported that two US intelligence agencies believe the Emirates has recently stepped up supplies of weaponry – including ammunition and sophisticated Chinese-made drones. It has also emerged that British equipment supplied to the UAE may have ended up in RSF hands.

Emirati supply lines running through eastern Libya, Chad and Somalia have been “going gangbusters” since the SAF forced the RSF out of Khartoum at the end of the last dry season in March, says Kholood Khair, a Sudanese political analyst.

That now appears to have been preparation for a major counter-offensive once the rains stopped in autumn. The storming of El Fasher may only be the first stage: RSF forces also seem to be massing for further attacks – particularly around Barah, their easternmost stronghold, towards the strategic city of El-Obeid – designed to open the way back to Khartoum.

The Emiratis have never explained the logic of their involvement, says Khair. One former Western official flippantly suggests that they may be doing it for “fun”, since there is no other obvious interest it serves.

“It is a really, really hard thing to pin down — there are a lot of theories flowing around,” says Brown.

There are, however, several rationales. On the surface, there is an ideological one: the UAE’s ruling families view the SAF as a holdout of Omar al-Bashir’s overthrown Islamist regime.

By that logic, the RSF serves as a bulwark against Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which Gulf monarchies regard as their most insidious enemy. The same reasoning has been used to justify Emirati support for Khalifa Haftar, commander-in-chief of the Libyan National Army.

Mohamed Hamdan “Hemeti” Dagalo, the RSF’s leader, is also close to the Emirates, having sent his men to fight on their behalf in Yemen and based his gold-trading business in Dubai.

Sudan, meanwhile, is rich in gold, oil and other raw materials.

Then there is food security, says one Sudanese diplomat: the UAE, like other Gulf states, has a growing population but very little farmland. Sudan, by contrast, is blessed with a breadbasket landscape.

“The strategic thinking is that whether the war ends through a power-sharing peace deal or a de facto partition, the RSF is likely to end up close to power,” says Soliman. “If that includes some or all of the Red Sea coast, so much the better – but controlling a swath of the interior would do fine.”

Talk of partition, dividing Sudan between an RSF-held west and an SAF-held east, has gained traction as the war has dragged on.

For now, though, the RSF and its backers seem determined to push back towards the capital, while the SAF and theirs remain loath to legitimise the idea of a rebel RSF “state”.

All of this, however, is part of a broader, some say almost imperial, project to build an Emirati sphere of influence. Trace the arc of alleged UAE supply lines – through the stretch of eastern Libya controlled by Haftar, across Chad, Uganda and, reportedly, parts of Somalia – and it encompasses a vast swath of north-east Africa.

And Emirati influence extends well beyond Sudan’s borders. By 2023, the UAE was the fourth-largest investor in Africa, after China, Europe and the United States.

Last year, it emerged as the biggest single backer of new businesses on the continent, pouring in $110bn (£85bn).

DP World, the Emirati port operator, has management agreements in Angola, Djibouti, Egypt, Morocco, Mozambique, Senegal, Somalia and Tanzania, and says it is exploring further opportunities in Kenya and South Africa.

“They have gone from investing very little in Africa over the past decade to being seen as the continent’s predominant investor. It is very strategic,” says Soliman.

The drive is fuelled by competition with Turkey and Saudi Arabia for influence over the Red Sea straits and the Horn of Africa.

It is telling that the West is absent from this new dash for Africa. The world has changed: middle-sized powers are no longer as beholden to Washington or other patrons as they once were, says Khair. And even if they were, the major powers are distracted – by Gaza, Ukraine and China.

In the 1990s or 2000s, it would have been hard to imagine such a conflict unfolding without British and American leaders facing pressure in the House of Commons and the Senate over the lessons of the Srebrenica massacre and the Rwandan genocide.

Now, says Brown, “there’s not even a whisper of people talking about, you know, humanitarian intervention. It’s just not even in the ballpark of sensible debate.”

Khair argues that there is still leverage. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt are, after all, Western allies and trading partners. Britain and the US could suspend arms exports to the Emirates unless they bring their clients to heel.

Until then, the killing will continue.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]