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Sudan’s war is inflaming ethnic tensions across the country and threatening to turn the battle between two military factions into a broader war along tribal lines.
“The escalation of war narratives by both sides is fueling ethnically charged rhetoric,” the Advocacy Group for Peace in Sudan (AGPS) said in a statement. The group said that inflammatory claims by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have spurred dangerous regional and ethnic mobilization.
The AGPS compared Sudan’s rising ethnic animosity to the early stages of the Rwandan genocide in 1994.
“Sudan stands on the brink,” the group wrote, urging leaders on both sides to moderate their rhetoric and seek a peaceful solution to the conflict that has killed more than 62,000 and displaced millions since April 2023.
Observers say attacks by the RSF on civilians in the al-Gezira and Darfur regions, among others, are driving the rise of ethnic militias as a form of communal self-defense.
“There is no safe place in Sudan now,” Mohamed Chande Othman, head of a recent United Nations fact-finding mission, said in a statement.
In al-Gezira, the RSF launched a series of ethnically motivated attacks after one of its local leaders, Abu Agla Keikil, defected to the SAF. The attacks killed 124 civilians and led to more than 37 sexual assaults, according to journalist Martin Plaut, who writes about insecurity in the Horn of Africa.
Plaut reported that five RSF advisors defected at the end of October.
In Darfur, RSF assaults on non-Arab tribal groups, such as the Masalit, have mirrored the genocidal attacks on the population that the RSF’s predecessor, the Janjaweed, launched in Darfur 20 years ago. The RSF draws from Darfur’s ethnically Arab Rizeigat community.
Sudan’s ethnically motivated attacks in West Darfur have included abductions of young and old women by RSF fighters for sexual slavery. Victims have reported their attackers telling them: “We will make you, the Masalit girls, give birth to Arab children.”
Ethnic attacks in Darfur prompted two local militias, the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Justice and Equality Movement, to align themselves with the SAF against the RSF in April. Both groups are based in the non-Arab Fur, Zaghawa and Masalit communities.
A day later, RSF fighters burned down several non-Arab villages in North Darfur.
With 19 major ethnic groups and nearly 600 sub-groups among its 49 million citizens, Sudan risks devolving further into intertribal conflict as the war between the SAF and RSF continues, according to observers.
If that happens, Sudan’s conflict could engulf neighboring Chad, which shares tribal ties along its border with Darfur.
The Zaghawa tribe, for example, spans the Chad-Sudan border. So does the Rizeigat group that makes up much of the RSF. A tribal conflict in North Darfur could draw in fighters from Chad, according to Remadji Hoinathy, an expert with South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies.
“Zaghawa people from remote villages in Chad — who live along the border and are very armed — could absolutely be implicated in the conflict [in North Darfur],” Hoinathy told Al Jazeera.
To reduce the threat of widespread tribal conflict, Sudan’s leadership must address Sudan’s historic ethnic and wealth disparities to build a common vision of the future, according to Hamdy A. Hassan.
“Achieving peace in Sudan requires a focus on the concerns of marginalized populations in conflict zones and deprived regions,” Hassan, a professor at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates, wrote in The Conversation. “It also requires addressing the root causes of armed violence.”
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