World At Net · Global Affairs · Africa and Conflict Desk
Darfur: Weaponising Identity
How ethnicity became the organising logic of Sudan's deadliest war
A city under siege for eighteen months fell in a matter of days. Thousands were killed for the tribe they were born into, not the uniform they wore. This is the story of how Darfur's old wound was reopened, and why the world's response has once again arrived too slowly to matter.
| 📖 Reading time | 14 to 17 minutes |
| 🌍 Coverage | Sudan, Darfur region, international response |
| 📅 Last updated | 26 July 2026 |
| ✍️ By | Shahzad Ashraf Butt |
A War That Returned to Its Origins
Sudan has been at war with itself since April 2023, when a partnership of convenience between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces collapsed into open combat for control of the state.
In most of the country the war reads as a conventional struggle for power between two generals, Abdel Fattah al Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo. In Darfur it reads as something older and darker. This is the same region, and in the view of United Nations investigators, the same targeted communities, that suffered the genocide of the early 2000s, when Arab militias known as the Janjaweed burned villages belonging to the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa peoples with the tacit backing of the Khartoum government of the time.
Many of those militias were absorbed into what later became the Rapid Support Forces. The institutional memory, the commanders, and in some documented cases the individual fighters, never left. What changed in 2023 was the scale of weaponry, the presence of drones, and the near total absence of the international guardrails that once, however imperfectly, constrained mass violence in this part of Africa.
Identity as a Targeting System
What makes Darfur distinct from the wider Sudanese civil war is that survival there is increasingly determined not by which armed faction a person supports, but by which ethnic group they were born into. According to the Wikipedia archived record of the conflict and multiple field investigations, the Rapid Support Forces and allied Arab militias have systematically targeted the Masalit, Fur, Zaghawa, Berti, Tama and Erenga peoples, all non Arab communities indigenous to the region.
Reporting from Human Rights Watch on the 2023 assault on El Geneina in West Darfur described attacks against ethnic Masalit residents that killed thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands within weeks. Identity in Darfur is checked at roadblocks, inferred from accent and skin tone, and confirmed through tribal registries. A person's papers can save them or condemn them.
This is not incidental violence that happens to fall along ethnic lines. It is, as the International Criminal Court's own prosecutor told the UN Security Council, a pattern of crimes, perpetrators and targeted groups that tracks with striking precision onto the genocide the Council referred to the Court back in 2005.
For readers who have followed our earlier coverage of how conflict dismantles the basic protections owed to civilians, the parallel with the machinery of famine and displacement examined in Gaza: A Land Reduced to Rubble is difficult to avoid, even as the political geography could not be more different.
The Fall of El Fasher: Anatomy of a Massacre
For eighteen months, El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, was the last major stronghold the Sudanese Armed Forces held in the region, and home to hundreds of thousands of civilians, most of them non Arab.
The Rapid Support Forces besieged it, cutting food, water, medicine and communications, before launching a final offensive at the end of October 2025 that overran the city within roughly a week. The numbers that emerged afterward are difficult to absorb.
The UN Human Rights Office, in a report released in February 2026 based on interviews with more than 140 victims and witnesses in Sudan and eastern Chad, documented more than 6,000 killings in the first three days of the offensive alone, and assessed that at least 4,400 people were killed inside the city with a further 1,600 killed along the routes civilians used to flee, figures the report itself describes as an undercount of the true toll.
Amnesty International, in a report published on 30 June 2026 titled City Under Siege, Children Under Fire, documented murder, forcible transfer, torture, rape, sexual slavery, enslavement and persecution based on ethnic identity, and stated its evidence may be relevant to establishing the crime of genocide.
Analysis of satellite imagery by the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale's School of Public Health, published in December 2025, assessed with high confidence that Rapid Support Forces fighters carried out widespread and systematic mass killings after seizing the city, in some cases using Chinese made drones to accelerate the pace of the violence. Roughly half a million people are estimated to have fled El Fasher since it fell.
Verified figures on El Fasher
Over 6,000 people killed within the first 72 hours of the October 2025 offensive, at least 4,400 inside the city and 1,600 more along escape routes, according to the UN Human Rights Office. Around 500,000 people have fled the city since its fall.
Starvation as Strategy
Bullets and blades are only part of how identity is punished in Darfur. Hunger has become an instrument of policy. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system, the global standard used by the United Nations and its partners, confirmed with reasonable evidence that famine, its highest and most severe classification, existed in El Fasher and in Kadugli in South Kordofan as of September 2025.
By May 2026, joint analysis from the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Programme and UNICEF found that nearly 19.5 million people, roughly two out of every five people in Sudan, faced crisis level or worse acute food insecurity, including about 135,000 people across fourteen hotspots in Darfur and Kordofan classified in the catastrophic phase.
An estimated 825,000 children under five are projected to suffer severe acute malnutrition in 2026, a quarter higher than levels recorded before the war began. In the North Darfur localities of Um Baru and Kernoi, which absorbed large numbers of people fleeing El Fasher, assessments in December 2025 found acute malnutrition affecting more than half of all young children, with global acute malnutrition measured at 52.9 percent, far beyond the 30 percent threshold used to define famine conditions.
Our earlier reporting on the mechanics of engineered scarcity, in pieces such as The Thirst and The Hunger and The Water Reckoning, argued that famine in modern conflict is rarely an accident of drought. Darfur is now the starkest illustration of that argument available anywhere in the world.
By the numbers: 19.5 million people facing acute food insecurity across Sudan, 135,000 in catastrophic conditions, 825,000 children projected to suffer severe malnutrition in 2026, and nearly 9 million people internally displaced nationwide as of March 2026.
Nine Million Uprooted
Displacement on this scale reshapes an entire region's demography, and in Darfur's case that reshaping tracks closely with ethnicity, since it is overwhelmingly non Arab communities who have been forced to move.
Conflict driven displacement across Sudan stood at close to nine million people by the end of March 2026, according to figures compiled by UNICEF, the World Food Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization. Families who survived El Fasher fled toward Tawila and other towns in North Darfur, and onward across the border into Chad, joining refugee populations that had already fled earlier waves of violence at Zamzam camp, where an RSF assault in 2025 alone killed close to 2,000 people and forced roughly 400,000 people out.
Camps that were meant to be temporary have become semi permanent settlements straining the resources of host communities in Chad, one of the world's poorest countries, itself already stretched by other regional crises.
The pattern echoes what this publication documented in No Nation Is an Island, where climate stress, state fragility and ethnic division were shown to compound each other until displacement becomes not a temporary emergency but a permanent feature of a region's politics.
Gold, Drones and Foreign Patrons
Sudan's war is not being fought in isolation from the wider region. The Rapid Support Forces are widely reported, including by UN Panel of Experts assessments, to fund their campaign in part through control of gold extraction and smuggling networks that reportedly reach markets in the United Arab Emirates, which the RSF's opponents and numerous rights investigators accuse of supplying it with weapons.
The UAE has repeatedly and firmly denied providing any military support to the RSF, pointing to a UN Panel of Experts report from April 2025 that it says found no substantiated evidence of such support, and citing more than four billion dollars in humanitarian and development assistance it has given Sudan over the past decade.
Iran, for its part, has been implicated in supplying weaponry to the Sudanese Armed Forces, turning a domestic power struggle into a proxy contest with regional stakes. Both sides have also been documented using drone technology, including systems reportedly of Chinese origin, that has intensified the speed and lethality of attacks on civilian areas.
This internationalisation of the conflict is precisely what has made a negotiated ceasefire so difficult to achieve, since outside patrons on both sides have an interest in their client not losing outright.
Genocide by Any Other Name
The word genocide carries legal weight, and international bodies have moved toward it carefully but unmistakably. The UN Independent International Fact Finding Mission for Sudan reported in July 2026 that RSF forces carried out mass killings, gang rape, enforced disappearances and deliberate starvation against the Zaghawa and Fur communities during the siege of El Fasher, conduct it said bore the hallmarks of genocide.
The United States government has gone further, formally determining that the RSF committed genocide in Darfur and sanctioning its leadership. Yet formal legal accountability remains almost entirely absent.
Sudan is not a member of the International Criminal Court, but the UN Security Council referred the Darfur situation to the Court back in 2005 through Resolution 1593, giving it jurisdiction over crimes committed there since 2002.
Arrest warrants issued in 2007 and 2012 for figures including Ahmad Harun and Abdel Raheem Muhammad Hussein remain unexecuted, both men still at large.
More than three years into the current war, and despite repeated public assurances from the Prosecutor's office that new warrants tied to the 2023 violence in El Geneina and the 2025 fall of El Fasher were imminent, none had been filed as of this writing, even as the Court's deputy prosecutor described a recent breakthrough in evidence linking the atrocities to senior command structures. Investigation without indictment offers victims documentation, but not justice.
Twenty three years after the Security Council first referred Darfur to the International Criminal Court, the same communities are being killed for the same reasons, and not one of the original arrest warrants has been carried out.
The International Response: Diplomacy Without Leverage
The diplomatic record on Sudan is long, sincere in places, and largely unsuccessful. The United States and Saudi Arabia brokered the Jeddah Declaration in May 2023, committing both warring parties to protect civilians, a commitment that collapsed almost immediately.
Talks convened in Manama and later in Geneva in 2024 produced modest humanitarian access gains but no ceasefire, partly because the Sudanese Armed Forces refused to sit in the same room as RSF delegates without preconditions.
In September 2025 the Quad, made up of the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, issued a joint statement proposing an initial three month humanitarian truce leading to a permanent ceasefire and a civilian led transition.
The RSF welcomed the plan, widely seen as an attempt to rehabilitate its image, while the Sudanese government rejected it outright, objecting specifically to the UAE's role in the process given the accusations against it.
The UN Security Council has extended an arms embargo covering Darfur through September 2026, and in July 2026 the UAE itself publicly called for that embargo to be expanded to cover the whole of Sudan alongside an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.
The United States has imposed sanctions on Sudanese officials and militia groups tied to the war. None of these measures, individually or together, has stopped the killing in Darfur, and the gap between diplomatic statements and enforcement on the ground remains the defining feature of the international response.
Why the World Keeps Failing Darfur Twice
There is a bitter symmetry in the fact that the same region, the same tribes and in some cases the same commanders are once again at the centre of mass atrocity two decades after the world first said never again about Darfur.
Part of the explanation lies in geopolitics rather than indifference. Regional powers with competing interests in Sudan's gold, ports and Red Sea coastline have turned what should be a unified humanitarian intervention into a contest of proxies, each patron reluctant to pressure its own client too hard.
Part of it lies in the structure of international law itself, where a Security Council referral to the ICC can sit for two decades without producing a single completed prosecution, and where the phrase hallmarks of genocide is repeated in report after report without triggering the protective mechanisms that a formal genocide determination is supposed to unlock.
And part of it lies in humanitarian financing, documented at length in our earlier report The Two Trillion Dollar Silence, which found that the gap between what conflict affected children need and what donor states actually provide continues to widen even as verified violations against children reach record levels.
Darfur is not being ignored. It is being watched, documented and mourned in extraordinary detail by an international system that has built the tools to see atrocity clearly and has not built the political will to stop it.
What Comes Next
Nothing about the trajectory of this war suggests it ends soon. The Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces each retain external backers willing to keep them supplied, and each still believes it can win outright rather than negotiate.
For the communities of Darfur, that calculation means the coming lean season, running from June through September, will unfold against a backdrop of catastrophic food insecurity in a region already stripped of markets, clinics and functioning water systems.
The most realistic near term outcomes are incremental, a widened arms embargo, a possible ICC arrest warrant finally filed, further sanctions on individual commanders, none of which by itself changes the calculus on the ground. What would change it is coordinated pressure from the very governments currently divided over Sudan, backed by an enforceable and monitored arms embargo covering the entire country rather than Darfur alone.
Until that happens, the most accurate description of the international response to Darfur remains the one used by its own victims, that the world has excellent cameras and almost no brakes.
Developing story notice
Sudan's conflict is active and casualty, displacement and famine figures are updated frequently by the United Nations and independent monitors. This article reflects the most recent verified data available at the time of publication and will be revisited as the situation evolves.
Disclaimer
This article is an editorial analysis prepared by World At Net for informational purposes. It draws on reporting and findings from the United Nations, its Human Rights Office and Fact Finding Mission, the International Criminal Court, Amnesty International, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system, and other publicly available sources cited throughout. Casualty figures, displacement numbers and food security classifications are estimates compiled by the cited organisations and may be revised as further verification takes place. This article does not represent a legal finding of genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity against any individual or organisation, and all parties referenced retain the right to respond to or dispute characterisations made in the sources cited. Readers seeking to support humanitarian response in Sudan should verify organisations through recognised bodies such as the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
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