Of the 108 villages for which the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR) has verified burnings, more than a quarter (27%) have been targeted more than once since April 2023.
Violent confrontations broke out between the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) on April 15, 2023. The RSF and local level disagreements have been blamed for a large number of these fires.
The flames are just one facet of a conflict that has caused millions of people to be forcibly displaced, violated their human rights, and resulted in over 100 documented cases of sexual assault according to the UN.
The recurrent fires may be a planned attempt to “instill a great level of fear and extreme violence to subdue and remove the population,” according to Sir Nicholas Kay, a former British ambassador to Sudan, who spoke with News. He also said there is “a determined consistent effort to ensure people leave and don’t come back ever.”
Cameron Hudson, a US-Africa policy expert, described the present RSF operation in Darfur as “ethnic cleansing” and related to war crimes “that some people will call genocide”—a reference to the horrors that occurred between 2003 and 2005.
