by Eugene Walker

What happens when people, in the process of making a revolution, have their revolution stolen and crushed, usurped by generals with arms, troops and mercenaries? What happens when the competing generals decide to war against each other by killing the citizens of the country? When the war becomes a war on women’s bodies? When the ruling powers of countries in the region are indifferent or hostile to that revolution? When some of the region’s powers decide to enter the slaughter, the displacement, the genocide, that the war has become, intent on grabbing natural resources, primarily gold, by taking sides with one or the other of the blood-covered generals? The answer: the reality of Sudan today.

THE ‘GENOCIDAL PATH’

Internally displaced refugees setting up shelter in Tawila, North Darfur, Oct. 2025. Photo: UNOCHA/ Mohamed Elgoni, CC BY-SA 2.0

That reality for one city in the Darfur region has been documented by a just issued UN report: “Hallmarks of Genocide in El-Fasher.” The opening paragraph reads:

“The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan (‘the Mission’) assesses that the mass killings and related atrocities committed by the Rapid Support Forces in and around El-Fasher, during its takeover of the city on or around 26 and 27 October 2025, are indicators of a genocidal path. These crimes followed an 18-month siege during which the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) deliberately imposed conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of non-Arab communities, in particular the Zaghawa and the Fur.”

In page after page the Mission documented atrocity upon atrocity—murders, rapes, torture. It makes for horrific reading.

All of this was well known in the months and weeks before the RSF’s final attack and slaughter. Yet the international community essentially did nothing to prevent the attack. Certain regional powers, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in particular, aided the Rapid Support Forces. Why? As Laura Wittebroek writes in CounterPunch:

“Crucially, this violence cannot be understood as purely internal. It is produced and sustained through foreign states and corporate actors that provide weapons, funding, and political backing to both sides. Through arms transfers, resource extraction, trade relationships, and migration control, external powers are embedded in Sudan’s war economy and are creating incentives to maintain the violence rather than resolve it. Sudan thus fits a recurring global pattern: violence is localized, responsibility diffused, and profits internationalized, a structure replicated from the Congo to Gaza to West Papua.”

Documenting the El-Fasher genocide is only one moment of the ongoing and long tragedy of Sudan. The RSF, an Arab army lead by Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, with a decades-long history of deadly, racist attacks against Black African peoples in Sudan, is one side—perhaps the more horrendous—of the Sudanese tragedy. The Sudanese Armed Forces is the other. Led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, in its war against the RSF, it has also purposefully killed thousands of Sudanese civilians.

ENRICHMENT FOR THE FEW ON THE GRAVES OF THOUSANDS

The two generals and their armies were at first united in usurping and then destroying the revolution the masses had launched in 2018-2019 against the Omar al-Bashir dictatorship. A subsequent split between the generals led to their war against each other, but principally against the Sudanese people.

The war, now entering its third year, has resulted in what has been called the gravest humanitarian crisis of the 21st Century. It is estimated that as many as 400,000 have been killed, 11 million displaced, with Sudan today experiencing the world’s greatest hunger crisis.

The international big powers have done little to halt the slaughter, or care for the displaced. Starvation is widespread and little aid has been donated. Words of condemnation are easily spoken, but decisive action is absent.