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A major surge in fighting in Sudan has taken a searing toll on civilians, killing hundreds of people in aerial bombings and revenge attacks in the past week, as Africa’s largest war shifts into a higher gear after the end of seasonal rains.
Territory has changed hands, a prominent commander has switched sides and retreating fighters have sexually assaulted, kidnapped and killed villagers as they have moved through contested countryside, according to activists, democracy groups and accounts on social media.
A military cargo plane slammed into the desert in the western region of Darfur, with at least two Russian crew members on board, offering direct evidence of the growing role of foreign contractors in the fighting.
And Sudan’s military, after losing control of vast areas of Sudan, has finally seemed to regain the advantage over the Rapid Support Forces, the powerful paramilitary group that it has been battling for the past 18 months. Both sides face a barrage of war crimes accusations from the United States and rights groups, although only the R.S.F. has been accused of ethnic cleansing.
“The fighting season has just restarted, and both sides want to jostle for an early advantage,” said Kholood Khair, the founding director of Confluence Advisory, a policy think tank.
The escalating violence comes against a vast tableau of suffering. Over 10 million have been forced from their homes, famine is raging and diseases like cholera and dengue fever are rapidly spreading.
Diplomatic efforts to end the war have stalled, with neither side showing much willingness to compromise on anything, much less reach a cease-fire. Support is growing among activists, peacekeeping experts and human rights groups for the United Nations to deploy a mission to protect civilians, but many are skeptical such a force could be mustered.
“We fear it is on the road to becoming a repeat of the 1994 Rwanda genocide,” Roméo Dallaire, who led the U.N. mission in Rwanda during the genocide, wrote in Foreign Policy on Friday.
In the past week, the army, led by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, captured territory in the breadbasket states of El Gezira and Sennar, which the paramilitary forces seized starting last December. Those gains came in part thanks to the defection of Abu Aqla Kaykal, a local militia leader in El Gezira State who, until recently, was fighting with the Rapid Support Forces. Experts said his defection gave the military a political boost and would cut off the paramilitary group’s ability to recruit from the large Shukria tribe.
By publicizing the defection, Ms. Khair said, “the military are trying to assert their claim that they are on the right side” and that their wins are “a victory for the people of Sudan.”
The paramilitaries, who are led by Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, launched retaliatory attacks in villages across El Gezira, local activists reported. At least 300 civilians were killed when fighters rampaged through Tambul village, Elmubir Mahmoud, the secretary general of the Al Jazeera Conference, a volunteer group in the state, said in an interview. Gunmen looted homes, took hostages and sexually assaulted women, he said.
Fifty more civilians were killed in a nearby village on Friday morning, he said, and 200 were wounded. Entire families fled with nothing but their clothes, he said. Others posted handwritten lists of the dead. The New York Times could not independently verify the lists or the figures.
Video footage and photographs from the area that were shared on social media showed villagers standing over dozens of bodies wrapped in funeral shrouds. The footage and photographs could not be immediately verified.
“The situation is very tragic,” Mr. Mahmoud said.
The R.S.F. denied killing civilians, saying those killed had been fighting alongside the military. “Immediately you carry a gun and raise it, then your civilian status ends,” Omran Abdullah, a senior adviser to General Hamdan, said this past week in an interview with the Arabic-language broadcaster Al Jazeera.
Clashes continued in Khartoum, the capital, where the army recently recaptured several bridges along the Nile. Shelling in the city killed at least 24 people this past week, according to the Emergency Response Rooms, a youth-led volunteer group that was among the favorites for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded this month to a Japanese group of atomic bomb survivors.
Fighting also raged in the western region of Darfur, both around the besieged city of El Fasher in North Darfur and in the deserts to the north, along the border with Libya and Chad. Dozens of people were killed in the state in attacks on displacement camps, hospitals and markets, according to the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab. It said the damage was consistent with aerial bombardment, artillery and arson.
On Monday, a Sudanese military plane crashed about 90 miles north of El Fasher, killing two Russian crew members and several Sudanese fighters, according to Sudanese media reports.
The paramilitaries, who claimed to have shot down the plane, posted a video of the burning wreckage, with jubilant fighters holding aloft two Russian passports and other identifying documents said to be found amid the debris.
An aviation official with knowledge of Sudanese military operations said the plane was one of two Ilyushin-76 planes bought last year by the Sudanese military, which has claimed that it was delivering supplies to besieged troops in El Fasher when it crashed.
But the official said the plane had also been used to carry out “barrel bomb” raids against the R.S.F., flinging crude improvised bombs, as part of the military’s escalating campaign of aerial bombardment.
The aviation official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military details. A spokesman with Sudan’s military did not respond to questions for comment.
In a statement, the Russian Embassy in Sudan said it was investigating whether its citizens were on board the plane, which only last year belonged to a company that had been supplying the other side in the war.
Documentation found in the plane wreckage indicated that its tail number, EX-76011, corresponded with a plane that was previously operated by New Way Cargo, a cargo airline based in the United Arab Emirates. Only last January, the same airline delivered support to the Rapid Support Forces through a base at Amdjarass in eastern Chad, according to a recent report by the Sudan Conflict Observatory, a research body funded by the State Department.
The Emirates has been running an extensive covert operation to supply the R.S.F. through the Amdjarass base, under the guise of providing humanitarian aid, The New York Times and U.N. inspectors have reported. The Red Cross says it is investigating whether its emblem was misused as part of the operation. The Emirates denies supporting the R.S.F.
Documents found on the plane identified one of the Russians as Anton Selivanetz, who appears to have previously worked with the United Nations in Africa, according to a U.N. official and photographs posted to his personal Instagram account. The other man, Viktor Granov, was previously linked to arms trafficking in Africa by Amnesty International, as well as to the famous arms dealer Viktor A. Bout. Mr. Granov’s South African driver’s license was among the debris from the downed cargo plane.
The plane crash highlighted the outsize role of foreign contractors in the worsening conflict, pushing both local and global leaders to call for the United Nations to deploy a mission to protect civilians.
“This is very much a multiregional war of different actors,” Ms. Khair said. By no means, she added, “can it be resolved locally.”
Malachy Browne and Sanjana Varghese contributed reporting.
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