(Bloomberg) -- Even as global powers meet in New York on Wednesday to discuss how to end Sudan’s brutal civil war — and get the foreign countries fueling it on board — the ongoing assault on a major city in the famine-stricken Darfur region makes the likelihood of peace even more remote.
El-Fasher, the last city still controlled by Sudan’s army in Darfur, has become a symbol of the devastation unfolding in the mineral-rich North African nation where tens of thousands of people have been killed and at least 10 million have been displaced in 17 months of fighting. Iran, Russia and the United Arab Emirates have been accused of supplying both the military and the Rapid Support Forces militia it’s fighting with weapons, according to Western officials and United Nations investigators.
“The world needs to stop arming the generals,” US President Joe Biden told the UN General Assembly on Tuesday. “Speak with one voice and tell them: ‘Stop tearing your country apart. Stop blocking aid to the Sudanese people. End this war now.” The leaders of the Group of Seven nations convened on Monday night and “called on external actors to refrain from fueling the conflict,” said Italy’s Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani.
Ahead of Wednesday’s meetings on Sudan, US Vice President Kamala Harris held talks with the UAE’s President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed where she “raised her deep concerns about the conflict in Sudan” and “underscored the critical importance of getting the warring parties to the table,” the White House said. The UAE has repeatedly denied supplying weapons to the RSF.
On Wednesday, Saudi Arabia, the UN and other member states will call for “urgent and collective support” to address the humanitarian catastrophe in Sudan, the UN said in a statement on Monday. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will attend a separate meeting hosted by the US, France, Germany and the European Union focused on moving toward a ceasefire after a year of false starts, according to two officials briefed on the matter.
But the chances of achieving anything substantial are slim, the officials said, in part because the RSF have not been invited to the meetings in New York and because of the ongoing assault on El-Fasher.
Besieged City
War broke out in April last year when the RSF and Sudan’s army, which jointly overthrew a civilian-led government, turned on each other in a battle to control Africa’s third-largest country. The conflict has destroyed the capital, Khartoum, and cities across the nation, and included accusations of war crimes against both sides.
The RSF — which is descended from the notorious janjaweed militias that perpetrated the Darfur genocide in the early 2000s — has in recent days carried out a barrage of artillery attacks on El-Fasher, the region’s main hub with a population of around 1.5 million people.
The RSF could soon take the city, humanitarian officials and diplomats briefed on the situation said, speaking on the condition of anonymity as they are not authorized to speak publicly.
In the past week, the army has repelled dozens of attacks by the RSF, with a further 1,500 people fleeing the city following a recent escalation in violence, according to Clementine Nkweta-Salami, the UN humanitarian coordinator for Sudan.
“I urge the parties to halt attacks on civilians, homes and essential facilities, such as hospitals, which are protected under the international humanitarian law,” Nkweta-Salami said.
Satellite images provided by Planet Labs and The Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale School of Public Health show the city in ruins, with several residential areas burned to the ground, hospitals damaged and camps for the displaced deserted.
The Humanitarian Research Lab published images on Sept. 20 of RSF forces located in the center of El-Fasher, along with freshly excavated grave sites in areas controlled by the army.
“El-Fasher is dialing 911 and nobody is picking up the phone,” said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab. He said an area the size of at least 200 football fields had been destroyed inside El-Fasher, with dozens of villages in the surrounding area also razed to the ground.
The United Nations officially declared a famine inside a camp for displaced people last month in what has become the world’s worst hunger and displacement crises. The global health organization Médecins Sans Frontières this week warned of a “maternal health crisis” and found that nearly a third of children between the age of 6 and 23 months were acutely malnourished, exceeding the highest food insecurity emergency threshold as measured by the UN.
--With assistance from Augusta Saraiva.
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