In 2023, the world focused on two wars – one in Israel and Gaza, the other in Ukraine. But war was also raging in Sudan – a war as brutal and bloody, and as devastating in its toll. Many have referred to the conflict, now in its tenth month, as “the forgotten war.” Reuters did not forget.
Within days of the fighting’s outbreak in Khartoum in April, a Reuters reporter and videographer were in Sudan, documenting the flow of refugees north to the Egyptian border. Days later, with the war spreading to Darfur, we were on the Chad border with Sudan, chronicling the refugees fleeing an ethnically-targeted killing campaign in El Geneina, capital of West Darfur.
In total, the team of Maggie Michael, El Tayeb Siddig and Zohra Bensemra spent almost two months on the Chad-Sudan border interviewing, filming and photographing over 300 survivors of the ethnic bloodletting spearheaded by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), an Arab-dominated paramilitary, and its allied Arab militias in Darfur. Data journalists led by Ryan McNeill fortified the on-the-ground reporting with analysis of hundreds of satellite and still images and a review of video footage. In Khartoum, Khalid Abdelaziz and colleagues in Cairo provided early and exclusive insight into how the conflict broke out, while Michael exposed the terrible toll in the nation’s capital as dozens of babies died in an orphanage.
The result of this multi-front reporting effort: the most revelatory and shocking account of how the fighting that erupted in Khartoum between the Sudanese army and the RSF turned into a campaign of ethnic slaughter waged against the Masalit people of West Darfur.
The reporting team lay bare the racial animus and the methods of torture used against the darker-skinned Masalit by Arab forces. Masalit were routinely called “slaves.” Men were hung from trees by the arms for days. One described being locked in a room for three days without food or water with 10 other men. Some were so thirsty, he said, they drank their own urine. The methods of killing were grotesque. People were picked off by snipers, burned in their homes, beaten to death, crushed by vehicles and had their throats slit. Some were executed after admitting under interrogation they were Masalit.
In documenting the violence, the team discerned patterns that revealed the attacks weren’t random: They were systematic and coordinated. Mortar fire was directed at areas in El Geneina where the Masalit lived. Masalit males, from babies to adults, were targeted for killing – an effort to eliminate “the line of ancestry of a specific ethnic group,” as one UN official put it. Rape again became a weapon of war in Darfur, as we documented in “Targeted for Rape.” When the carnage was over, multiple witnesses told Reuters, the RSF and its allies covered up the atrocities by having bodies buried on the outskirts of El Geneina.
