The war in Sudan, in maps and charts
IS THE FINAL battle for Darfur under way? Since September fighting has intensified in el-Fasher, the capital of Sudan’s Darfur region and the last significant outpost of the national army, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). The city has been under siege for months by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary force with roots in Darfur and ambitions to rule the country. After a long stalemate, the RSF has made some significant advances in el-Fasher. The SAF has responded with a fierce campaign of aerial bombardment.
El-Fasher has acquired totemic significance in the country’s 16-month civil war, which started after fighting broke out between the two rival factions. For the RSF, capturing the city would allow it to mop up any remaining resistance in Darfur, secure control of the country’s western border with Chad, and continue its march eastwards to the Red Sea. For the SAF, keeping RSF troops tied up in their home region is crucial to its strategy for regaining territory in and around Khartoum, the country’s capital. The SAF’s allies in el-Fasher—a coalition of Darfuri rebels drawn primarily from the local Zaghawa, a black African ethnic group—are also involved in the fighting. Both the rebels and rights groups accuse the predominantly Arab RSF of ethnic cleansing against black Africans.
The most recent escalation in fighting appears to have begun with the end of the rainy season in early September. Nathaniel Raymond of the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, which monitors the conflict using satellite imagery, says that the RSF launched powerful “probing attacks” from the east to move closer to the SAF’s 6th infantry division in the city centre. These advances, Mr Raymond says, have limited the SAF’s ability to launch air strikes without “firing on its own men”.
The intensity of the recent fighting is visible from space: satellite images show disturbances in the earth consistent with mass burials. One likely gravesite appears to be in western el-Fasher, in an area still under the control of the SAF and its allies. The total surface area of the suspected gravesite became five times as large between August 23rd and September 20th. Another site, near the SAF’s air base, more than doubled over the same period. Yale believes the bodies are being buried by the SAF and its local allies. However, they are unable to estimate the number of dead in these mass burials. No one is tallying deaths in Sudan. These may number 150,000, or more.
The RSF appeared to overrun much of the city centre in September, in what was “the most significant advance by the RSF in el-Fasher to date”, according to Mr Raymond. The SAF’s infantry headquarters, and surrounding territory held by its allies, is being encircled from the north, east and south-east by RSF forces. Satellite images from October indicate that the territory under the control of the SAF and its allies has shrunk to the smallest it has been since the battle for el-Fasher began in May. (More recently, however, the SAF and its allies appear to have regained some of this lost ground.) Civilians are fleeing in large numbers towards a displacement camp in the south of el-Fasher, which the UN reckons is already in the grip of famine.
The fate of the hundreds of thousands of civilians now sheltered in the Zamzam camp has sparked international alarm. António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, has called on the RSF to halt its offensive immediately. But with the rainy season over, battle lines across Sudan are shifting. In late September the SAF launched its biggest military operation in Khartoum to date. The RSF, for its part, has launched new attacks in the central Kordofan region. Both sides now appear to be sending large numbers of reinforcements to el-Fasher, too. Whatever happens in the coming weeks, Mr Raymond expects “the most high intensity fighting we’ve seen in Darfur since the start of the war.” ■