Sudan (2003-Present)
Sudan’s history of civilization stretches back to ancient times with its territory containing more pyramids than Egypt. The country gained independence from Britain in 1956 as the first sub-Saharan British possession to do so after World War II. Before South Sudan seceded in 2011, it was also Africa’s largest country by area.
The first genocide in Sudan took place in Darfur between 2003 and 2005. These atrocities unfolded during the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005), a decades-long conflict between the Sudanese government, led by ethnic Arabs, and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), comprised of non-Arab Sudanese people fighting for independence. While the SPLM/A eventually succeeded in breaking away to form the new nation of South Sudan, liberation movements in Sudan’s westernmost region of Darfur struggled.
The Darfur conflict grew out of tensions rooted in the Arab-identifying central government’s marginalization of non-Arab communities in Darfur, a region in western Sudan. The Zaghawa, Masalit, and Fur peoples were among those populations. In the early 2000s, a group of Zaghawa and Fur agreed to rebel against the government because of what they perceived to be the disempowerment of their communities. Masalit activists joined the effort a year later.
When rebel groups, including the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), emerged in Darfur in 2003, the Sudanese government launched a systematic campaign of genocide against all civilians belonging to the same ethnicity as members of the rebels from those communities.
The Sudanese military and its Arab proxy militia, the Janjaweed, carried out a scorched-earth strategy designed to destroy rebellious Darfuri communities. They killed approximately 200,000 Darfuris through direct violence, starvation, and disease, and they forced another two million to flee. Soldiers and militias committed widespread sexual violence and rape, as well as repeatedly blocked humanitarian aid. Declining rainfall and the corresponding degradation of land further exacerbated conflicts over water, pastures, and farmland.
In 2004, United States (US) Secretary of State Colin Powell formally declared the atrocities a genocide. Although a humanitarian ceasefire took effect that year, the killings continued. In 2008, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for crimes against humanity and war crimes. He was the first sitting head to be indicted by the ICC, making his indictment a historic one.
Two years later, the ICC added several counts of genocide to the indictment. During a civilian revolution supported by the army, military forces ousted al-Bashir in a 2019 coup. While Bashir has been held in military detention since then, he has not been extradited to the ICC.
Since the start of the most recent civil war, both the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which grew directly out of the Janjaweed, have perpetrated untold atrocities. These brutalities include sexual assaults, drone attacks against civilians, as well as blockades of humanitarian aid. In 2023, fighting escalated into open war between the SAF and the RSF. In January 2025, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken declared that genocide had occurred in Sudan yet again—this time, at the hands of the RSF.