As the world’s greatest human crisis takes a hideous turn, Trump turns away

The world has known about the disaster of El Fasher for more than a year.

The city was the last redoubt of Sudan’s armed forces in the western region of Darfur, which had otherwise mostly fallen under the sway of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces since the ruinous civil war between the two rival factions flared in 2023.

For 18 months, the residents of El Fasher, once a regional capital of over a million people, endured a gruelling siege, punctuated by massacres and other atrocities carried out by the RSF’s fighters.

No humanitarian aid could get in, and the attackers walled off the city with a sand berm. A full-blown famine hit the communities trapped within and in nearby displacement camps. Locals subsisted off animal feed, weeds and peanut shells. The desperate entreaties of United Nations officials to the international community fell on deaf ears.

In the past week, things took an all-the-more hideous turn in El Fasher. RSF units broke through and have captured the city, triggering the panicked flight of its remaining starving civilians.

The victorious militias, which are predominantly ethnically Arab, have gone on a shocking killing rampage of the local non-Arab population. The violence echoes the genocidal slaughters carried out by the Janjaweed militia – the RSF’s predecessor – in Darfur two decades ago.

Eyewitnesses reported numerous incidents of summary executions, rapes and other abuse. The latest brutality follows the RSF’s earlier campaigns in other parts of Darfur, which led to the Biden administration on its way out of office declaring that the group was guilty of acts of genocide.

This week, the RSF’s leader, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known by the sobriquet Hemedti, tried to assuage international observers that his outfit would investigate allegations of abuses. Hemedti’s reassurances mean little: he’s viewed by many as the man with the most blood on his hands.

On Thursday, the UN’s top humanitarian official, Tom Fletcher, briefed ambassadors at the Security Council about the “darker hell” to which El Fasher has descended.

“Women and girls are being raped, people being mutilated and killed – with utter impunity,” he said, detailing reports that have penetrated the telecommunications blackout gripping the war-torn country. “We cannot hear the screams, but – as we sit here today – the horror is continuing.”

In the shadow of Sudan’s misery, United States President Donald Trump has done conspicuously little. He insists he’s the world’s greatest peacemaker – claiming credit for resolving conflicts that, in some instances, are either still raging or never existed in the first place. But ending the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster has not been a priority for his administration.

The White House was more focused on gutting USAID, an agency that propped up critical elements of the humanitarian complex aiding Sudanese people. It also wants to fast-track deportations of unwanted migrants to neighbouring South Sudan, which itself is in the grip of a brewing civil war.

There’s no simple solution to ending the war in Sudan. The two rival forces – the Sudanese military under the country’s army chief General Abdel-Fattah Burhan, and Hemedti’s RSF – are entrenched in their fiefdoms and backed by a tangle of foreign powers.

The former counts on aid from countries like Egypt and Iran, while the RSF, which lost its foothold in the capital Khartoum in March, was reinforced by shipments of weapons from the United Arab Emirates. Turkey, Russia and even Ukraine have played roles in supplying the warring parties. Saudi Arabia and Qatar, too, have extensive interests in the region.

According to documents seen at the UN Security Council, RSF fighters touted British-manufactured small arms, among other materiel, that were likely first exported to the UAE.

A recent report in the Wall Street Journal cited the assessment of US intelligence agencies that the UAE also sent sophisticated weapons like Chinese drones to boost the sagging fortunes of the RSF, which seemed on the precipice of losing the war after its retreat from Khartoum. Now, it’s on firmer ground. It remains in control of much of Sudan’s gold mines, the ore of which often makes its way to markets in Dubai.

The UAE denies any role in supporting the RSF’s military campaign.

“The war would be over if not for the UAE,” a former chief of staff to successive US presidential special envoys for Sudan, Cameron Hudson, told the Journal. “The only thing that is keeping [the RSF] in this war is the overwhelming amount of military support that they’re receiving from the UAE.”

A host of analysts believe Trump could do more to lean on the UAE, a monarchy to which he has many close connections.

After relative silence, lawmakers in Congress are also starting to speak up. Senator James Risch, a Republican from Idaho and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called on the US to officially designate the RSF as a foreign terrorist organisation.

“The horrors in Darfur’s El Fasher were no accident – they were the RSF’s plan all along,” he said in a statement on Tuesday. “The RSF has waged terror and committed unspeakable atrocities, genocide among them, against the Sudanese people.”

Senator Jeanne Shaheen, from New Hampshire, Risch’s Democratic counterpart on the committee, pointed the finger at the US’s Gulf ally. “The UAE has been an irresponsible player who has contributed to one of the worst humanitarian crises that we have on the planet right now,” she told reporters on Wednesday.

There’s little hope for any Trumpian art of the deal in Sudan. “The US is not a hegemon here, but a secondary player in a crowded field of ambitious middle powers,” Sudanese analyst Elfadil Ibrahim noted, arguing that ending the war would require “sustained engagement and ... a willingness to exert real pressure on external patrons, as well as a long-term commitment to supporting a genuinely inclusive political process.”

For a White House that loves its quick deals and photo opportunities, such an effort is unlikely. And so a sprawling tragedy that has claimed more than 150,000 lives and displaced millions keeps unfurling.

“The Sudan crisis is, at its core, a failure of protection, and our responsibility to uphold international law,” Fletcher, the UN official, said on Thursday. “Atrocities are committed with unashamed expectation of impunity ... the world has failed an entire generation.”

The Washington Post

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