Middle East & Africa | Sudan’s civil war

Genocide returns to Darfur

Survivors tell of mass slaughter, murdered babies and kill lists

A nurse checks the IV of a malnourished child in a clinic on the outskirts of Adré town
Image: Joost Bastmeijer
|ADRÉ

Hanan Khamis just wanted to get to safety. In mid-June, after surviving weeks of gunfire and rockets directed at the Masalit, a black African ethnic group, she fled el-Geneina, the capital of the state of West Darfur in Sudan. Hoisting her 23-month-old baby boy, Sabir, onto her back she started walking towards Chad. Yet fighters wearing the uniforms of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) soon surrounded them. They dragged men to the side of the road and told the women to run. Before she could do so, a gunman wrenched open the shawl on her back that covered Sabir. “No men can escape to Chad,” he shouted. Then he shot her baby in the head.

This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline “The return of genocide in Darfur”

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