Brutal assassination of governor heralds new round of violence in Darfur

The assassination of a powerful governor in western Sudan’s Darfur has raised concerns that fighting between the country’s warring military factions is pushing a region ravaged by genocide 20 years ago into another ethnic civil war.

Since April, Sudan’s army has been battling the Rapid Support Forces, a well-armed paramilitary group that was until recently part of the national armed forces. The fighting has leveled parts of the capital Khartoum also swallowed up Darfur. Peace talks led by US and Saudi diplomats have not led to a lasting ceasefire.

With the fierce national conflict still in sight, Wednesday’s assassination of Khamis Abdullah Abakar, the governor of West Darfur, one of the five states that make up the region, threatened to further exacerbate a tinderbox region with a history of disastrous consequences. ignite. ethnic conflict.

The UN mission in Sudan said in a statement that “convincing eyewitness accounts attribute this act to Arab militias and the Rapid Support Forces.”

The killing came just hours after Mr Abakar gave a television interview blaming the Rapid Support Forces for a recent storm of violence. that led to hundreds of deaths in the area. Both the RSF and the Sudanese military have been accused of supporting rival armed groups in Darfur.

According to some, gunmen abducted Mr. Abakar from the state’s capital, El Geneina, though claims about the manner of his murder were impossible to immediately verify. Hours later, a video circulated showing Mr. Abakar’s body in blood-soaked clothes and with severe wounds. Analysts said in interviews that the video appeared genuine but could not be immediately verified.

The assassination of such a prominent figure threatened to further escalate the violence that has spread across Darfur since the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese army clashed. Spillover fighting has already led to villages being razed, refugees being sent across a nearby border and fueling fears that the wider conflict is spiraling out of control.

Mr Abakar’s assassination also raised concerns that the leaders of the two factions – the military chief, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the RSF leader, Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan – were struggling to control the forces they had unleashed under gain control.

In dueling statements, the military and the RSF blamed each other for Mr Abakar’s death. General Hamdan even called the United Nations envoy to Sudan, Volker Perthes, to reiterate his denials, said a UN official who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to speak in public. (That call in turn sparked speculation that General Hamdan, who has not been seen in public for weeks, was badly wounded or killed.)

Humanitarian leaders have repeatedly warned that the crisis in Sudan could soon get much worse. The fighting has already displaced 2.2 million people and killed more than 950, according to the main Sudanese doctors’ union. Other estimates put the death toll at more than 1,800.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, said Tuesday that he was “deeply concerned” about what he called “the increasing ethnic dimension of violence” in the Darfur region, as well as reports of widespread sexual violence.

David Miliband, head of the International Rescue Committee, an aid group, warned that Sudan was on track to “become the next Syria: the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis, both in terms of people in need and displacement to neighboring countries.”

While much of the focus of the wider conflict is on Khartoum, Darfur has seen some of the most intense bloodshed. In May, 280 people were killed in El Geneina as gunmen backed by RSF paramilitaries poured into the city and clashed with local armed groups that often targeted civilians.

The medical charity Doctors Without Borders reported on Thursday that another 6,000 people had fled El Geneina to nearby Chad, along with about 100,000 other people who had crossed the same border since mid-April.

Mr. Abakar was a veteran of the Darfur conflict for decades. He rose to prominence in the 1990s as a leader who defended his Masalit ethnic group against attacks by ethnic Arab fighters. Eddie Thomas, a fellow at the Rift Valley Institute, a regional research institute, said Mr Abakar had been “a village defender”, someone “who organized to defend their villages from the fires”.

Mr Abakar was imprisoned under Sudan’s then dictator, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, but escaped and fled to Chad. He later emerged as the leader of a rebel faction after Darfur plunged into civil war in 2003 when its fighters resisted the infamous Janjaweed militiawhose commanders included the current leader of the RSF, General Hamdan.

Mr Abakar turned to politics in 2021 when he signed a peace deal with Khartoum and became governor of West Darfur.

When fighting broke out in Sudan in April, Mr Abakar joined other officials in Darfur by calling for a ceasefire and insisting that Darfur is not drawn into a conflict between rival military divisions.