Al Jazeera Discovers Sudan Has a War, One Year Late
Al Jazeera reports on the Rapid Support Forces' (RSF) alleged massacre and takeover of El-Fasher, Darfur's main city. The article frames this as a pivotal moment for Sudan's war, raising questions about its implications. What it fails to adequately contextualize is that the RSF's atrocities in Darfur are not new; they are a direct continuation of patterns seen since the region's initial genocide
over two decades ago. The silence from many media quarters on Sudan's spiraling conflict and humanitarian disaster for much of the last year (or indeed, since 2003) has been deafening, often replaced by a sudden surge of concern when the violence becomes too large to ignore. One might wonder where this level of critical engagement was when the conflict began its rapid escalation in April 2023, or
during the mass killings in West Darfur last year documented by Human Rights Watch. It appears 'what does it mean for Sudan' is only a question media asks when there's no longer any plausible deniability of ongoing war crimes, by which point, for the affected populations, it means utter devastation.