Twenty-two years ago, the devils came on horseback. Now they come on pickup trucks mounted with machine guns, funded by gold and assisted by drones. Now, the devils fight against the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) rather than for it, and they’re doing so with more efficient tools. But if you’re a civilian in Darfur, the outcome is the same: genocide.

The conflict in Sudan today differs somewhat from the war in Darfur in the early 2000s, when the government in Khartoum was the instigator and the Janjaweed militia did its dirty work. Today’s war pits the SAF, led by Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by Mohammed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo. But, in Darfur, history just seems to be repeating itself, since the RSF is little more than the rebranded Janjaweed, and Hemedti was one of their commanders.

Like then, the violence is gut-wrenching. The United Nations Human Rights Council released a report from an independent fact-finding mission that found that the RSF “carried out large-scale and systematic attacks on civilians,” including mass killings, murder, torture, rape, sexual slavery and “destruction of essential survival objects.” The report called out the SAF for human rights violations as well, but of a less sadistic variety.

Notably, this report was released before the latest horrors were unleashed on the population of el-Fasher, the last major city of Darfur to succumb to........

© The Korea Times