A simple guide to what is happening in Sudan - BBC

[question everything]

Sudan plunged into a civil war in April 2023 after a vicious struggle for power broke out between its army and a powerful paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). It has led to a famine and claims of a genocide in the western Darfur region - with fears for the residents of city of el-Fasher after it was recently captured by the RSF.

More than 150,000 people have died in the conflict across the country, and about 12 million have fled their homes in what the United Nations has called the world's largest humanitarian crisis. It is the latest episode in bouts of tension that followed the 2019 ousting of long-serving President Omar al-Bashir, who came to power in a coup in 1989.

The coup was staged by the two men at the centre of the current conflict:

Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of the armed forces and in effect the country's president. And his deputy, RSF leader Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as "Hemedti". But then Gen Burhan and Gen Dagalo disagreed on the direction the country was going in and the proposed move towards civilian rule.

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Shooting between the two sides began on 15 April 2023 following days of tension as members of the RSF were redeployed around the country in a move that the army saw as a threat. It is disputed who fired the first shot but the fighting swiftly escalated, with the RSF seizing much of Khartoum until the army regained control of it almost two years later in March 2025.

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/simple-guide-happening-sudan-150049278.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall

[question everything]

1. Satellite images reveal "mass killing" persists in Sudan, researchers say - CBS

Satellite imagery suggests mass killings are likely continuing in and around Sudan's El-Fasher, Yale researchers said, as Germany's top diplomat on Saturday described the situation there as "apocalyptic."

At war with the regular army since April 2023, the Rapid Support Forces seized El-Fasher on Sunday, pushing the military out of its last stronghold in the western Darfur region after a grinding 18-month siege.

Since the city's fall, reports have emerged of summary executions, sexual violence, attacks on aid workers, looting and abductions, while communications remain largely cut off.

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Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab said fresh satellite images from Friday showed "no large-scale movement", giving them reason to believe much of the population may be "dead, captured, or in hiding.". The lab identified at least 31 clusters of objects consistent with human bodies between Monday and Friday, across neighborhoods, university grounds and military sites.

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Both the RSF -- descended from the Janjaweed militias accused of genocide in Darfur two decades ago -- and the army have faced war crimes accusations over the course of the conflict. The U.S. has previously determined the RSF committed genocide in Darfur.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/satellite-images-reveal-mass-killing-124052607.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall

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Where are the protesters on campuses, in the streets?

[Igel]

3. It's the wrong power dynamic.

It doesn't play into contemporary domestic or at least academic socio-political views, doesn't acknowledge demographic and religious realities.

Some tried to make it WEIRD-relevant when it was pointed out that the RSF was busily exterminating members of a certain ethnic group (not 'Arab' but 'black', there being mostly a cultural and linguistic difference from a Westerner's surface-level vision-based point of view), but that was only in some areas of the country. Still, it was what we'd classify as a one vulnerable population genociding another vulnerable population, and at some point intersectionality didn't provide a large enough delta to motivate people to protest.

Plus who could be protested that would gave a damn about US and Western protests? Protest to get Trump to intervene? Like, really? We want him intervening? Protest Biden and his administration? Bad optics in an election year, just look at the Palestinian protests and that mess. Maybe some could protest the Sudanese embassy ...? But that's not the RSF. Maybe protest those backing the RSF ...? Right, let's protest the Qatariy embassy or whoever and maybe they'd suddenly decide to care. Or, much more likely, they'd just call it a day and let a mostly empty building be protested for a while for the media's benefit ... like the majority of viewers care so why would the media that reach most people actually care?

Remember the Uighurs. Tibetans. Had people in the '90s arguing that the entire Vietnamese "boat people" and 'concentration camp' tales were a myth--even to a naturalized citizen who said, to their face, he was one of those "boat people" (with his immediate family) and his grandparents died in the camps. "You're lying!" Hard to challenge beliefs with facts, doncha know.

The I-P conflict has adherents and a large presence in American politics and American academic and political discourse; there are a lot of Palestinians in the US. A lot of Muslims support the Palestinians because of the location of Israel on "Muslim soil" and because Jews are specifically mentioned in the Qur'an as a foe. So that conflict unifies a variety of groups under a single banner. Not because of the Palestinians per se, any more than the much more numerous dead Uighurs or Sudanese matter per se. No, it matters because it matters to us for reasons apart from the sheer number of people being starved, raped, killed, etc.

[leftstreet]

2. DURec