Sudan war: deadly attacks in El Gezira ‘may force civilians to take up arms’

Reports about Rapid Support Forces (RSF) assaulting and killing people in El Gezira continue to be posted on social media. At dawn today, a group of RSF soldiers killed three members of one family in Hasaheisa. Raids on villages in the state in the past two days left nine people dead. Yesterday, people from the region launched the El Gezira Call, urging an immediate stop to the violence, amid fears that residents may take up arms to defend themselves.

The RSF continues to wreak deadly havoc in the countryside of El Gezira state, south of Khartoum. Today, the resistance committees of Hasaheisa reported on their Facebook page that RSF soldiers attacked a family in the town “under the pretext that there was a member of the army in the house”. They shot three of them dead, including a child.

In a post yesterday, the Hasaheisa Resistance Committees reported that RSF paramilitaries invaded the village of El Maribeea that day for the second time in two weeks. “The first attack aimed at plundering the village and the second one displacing its inhabitants.”

The attack yesterday resulted in the death of five villagers and the injury of dozens of others. Almost all villagers fled.

Another group of RSF soldiers again raided Kotrat El Dagala near Giteina yesterday. Four people sustained varying injuries, the resistance committee of the village reported on Facebook.

They said that in an attack on the village on Thursday, “four people were killed by RSF bullets”.

Following “the fall” of Wad Madani, capital of El Gezira, to the RSF on December 19 last year, people in the state have been harassed, raped, detained, injured, or killed by the marauding paramilitaries.

The Wad Madani Resistance Committees reported on February 29 that RSF members raided 53 villages in the state since they took control of El Gezira. The paramilitaries “committed the most heinous crimes” in El Gezira, “crimes that can be considered war crimes or crimes against humanity”.

The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) launched a counter-offensive against the RSF in El Gezira last week. On March 2, Sudan War Monitor (SWM) reported about violent SAF-RSF clashes west of Wad Madani. Two days later, SWM said that SAF’s 2nd, 17th, and 18th infantry divisions were surrounding El Gezira on three sides. News about battalions from Blue Nile state and groups of rebel combatants fighting alongside the army having been crushed by the RSFin the region, has not been verified so far.

El Gezira Call

A group of people from El Gezira, in Sudan and abroad, launched the El Gezira Call on Friday, in which they urge an immediate stop to “the violence, robberies, and harassment of people” living in the state.

They ask “the sons and daughters of Sudan to sign this call to help to halt what happened and still is happening in the towns and villages of El Gezira since the RSF entered Wad Madani, the state capital, on December 19, and extended its control over all areas of the state”.

The signatories accuse the RSF of “extrajudicial killings, random detentions in harsh conditions, torture, rape, and other war crimes and crimes against humanity. The violence “forced tens of thousands of families in El Gezira to flee from their towns and villages in search of safe havens in other places within the country.”

They further stated that “the security chaos and RSF sabotage severely affected the agricultural season in the state, once dubbed the breadbasket of Sudan. The fighting caused the closure of farms in the El Gezira Agricultural Scheme and of several large public sector projects, especially the El Junaid and Sennar sugar factories and farms, which will have disastrous effects on the entire country.”

The El Gezira Call appealed on the warring parties “to strictly adhere to the requirements of international humanitarian law regarding the protection of civilians, to adhere to the Jeddah Declaration signed in May 2023, and to seriously cooperate with international and local humanitarian organisations to realise an effective mechanism that guarantees the protection and flow of humanitarian aid to all those affected in Sudan’s war-torn regions.”

Self-defence

Adeeb Yousef, an expert in conflict prevention and former governor of Central Darfur, does not rule out that the continuing RSF attacks on civilians in El Gezira force them to take up arms to defend themselves, “as the people of Darfur did more than 20 years ago”.

Asked by Radio Dabanga about the possibility, he said that conflict analysis theories support this hypothesis. “El Gezira, that was always peaceful, will not continue like this if the conflict continues, especially considering the ease of obtaining weapons in the country.”

International human rights expert Abdelsalam Sayed, one of the people who prepared the El Gezira Call, told Radio Dabanga that “all these crimes are being committed in El Gezira without any media coverage.

“The communications network are almost anywhere still cut off, and correspondents have left the state. In addition, many people have been robbed of their smart phones,” he said.

The MTN and Zain networks are still not operating in Sudan. Sudani returned end February in parts of the country under control of the SAF.