Worsening the world's largest displacement crisis, attacks by RSF killing hundreds, have affected 120 villages in the Gezira, forcing another 135,000 people to flee.
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.
Read: Farmers killed across Sudan's agricultural heartland while hunger engulfs the war-torn country
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.
Crucial market towns attacked
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."
But not anymore. Abu Aqla Kakil, the RSF's commander in Gezira who is reported to have spared the eastern part of the state due to social ties with the communities there, defected to SAF on October 20. The RSF began reprisals on civilians the very next day, attacking Tambul and Rufaa multiple times since.
When the RSF reached the Safita Al-Ghanoub on October 23, residents of the village resisted the RSF. But the small weapons the army had distributed to them were no match for the RSF, which killed at least 14 and injured many more before overrunning the village. On October 25, the RSF besieged the village of Al-Sireha and ordered the residents to hand over their weapons. Refusing, the "residents told the RSF that there were no army units, only women and children sheltering in their village, and they would not allow the RSF to enter and harm them," Jamal told Peoples Dispatch.
In the massacre that followed, the RSF killed at least 124 people and wounded 200 others, before taking another 150 civilians as prisoners. A local monitoring group reported later that at least three of them, including a baby, were "slaughtered", after finding two bodies in the fields and another dumped in an irrigation canal. The fate of other captives remains uncertain, amid fears that they may also have been executed.
In total, the RSF has attacked over 60 villages centered around Tambul and Rufaa. Most residents there have fled. Villages in the vicinity that did not come under attack are also deserted because its residents have no means to survive without the markets in Tambul and Rufaa, Jamal explained.
Only those unable to flee remain. With artillery fire and road closures, the RSF is reportedly preventing the residents from leaving Rufaa to use them as "human shields" against SAF airstrikes.
Those left behind are short of food supply, most of which was looted by the RSF, not only from the markets but also from the homes they invaded. Water and electricity have been cut off, along with telephone lines.
"We are not able to contact any of them," Jamal said. The RSF has confiscated the Starlink devices that the RC members were using to communicate via the internet.
Attacks expanding to other areas
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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.
In the meantime, after welcoming into its ranks the defected RSF commander Kakil, "whose hands are stained with the blood of the people of Gezira", the army has withdrawn from the state, leaving civilians "to face death alone", making no attempts to protect them, the statement added. It called on the junior officers and soldiers "to take a clear stance against the failure of your leaders, who... are sacrificing our people for political gain."
