Before reaching her hometown of Al Junaynah in western Sudan at the beginning of January, Wafa Mohammed had to endure the usual humiliations at checkpoints run by the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the successors of the Arab Janjaweed militias that had already terrorized Darfur in the 2000s. “They keep telling you that you are Black, that you are as stupid as a donkey, that you are nothing but an abid [‘slave’ in Arabic]. You have to stay silent and keep your head down, otherwise they beat you,” said the 38-year-old Sudanese woman of Masalit ethnicity. She fled the fighting in June 2023, two months after the war began, to seek refuge in neighboring Chad, but she continues to travel regularly to the Sudanese province, which is inaccessible to the international press.
A little further on, as visitors enter the outskirts of the West Darfur city, they come across an unambiguous sign: “Al Junaynah Dar Arab” (“Al Junaynah is Arab land”). The warning is aimed at non-Arab populations, especially the Masalit, who are the main targets of an ethnic cleansing campaign carried out here by the RSF in 2023, which killed around 15,000 people, according to a United Nations report.
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