The war started in 2023. Since then, life has been absolute misery for one minority group in the region. Their enemy blockaded their city for over a year to starve them into submission. That blockade ended on October 26 this year, when gunmen entered the city and started massacring civilians. Thousands of children are at risk of some of the vilest horrors imaginable. A decades-long genocide has claimed thousands more victims.

This is not Gaza. This is Sudan. The minority in question is the Darfuri people of the city of El Fasher. The perpetrator is the Rapid Support Forces (rsf) militia. The rsf’s shocking brutality shows the world what real genocide looks like. The lack of outrage among the world’s so-called “human rights defenders” teaches an important lesson about why the world is the way it is.

Devils on Horseback

Most of the approximately 50 million people in Sudan are “Afro-Arab,” descendants of mixed marriages between Arab settlers and black Africans. They are mostly Muslim, speak Arabic, and consider themselves part of the wider Arab world. Darfur is Sudan’s westernmost region and is populated primarily by black Muslim Africans. Former dictator Omar Bashir launched a genocidal campaign against Darfur’s people between 2003 and 2005, killing an estimated 300,000 civilians and displacing 2.7 million. One of Bashir’s main instruments was the Janjaweed, militias whose name means “devils on horseback.”

Bashir was ousted in a 2019 military coup. Since then, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has led Sudan. The Janjaweed became the rsf and, together with the conventional military, it ruled Sudan through an uneasy power-sharing agreement. This agreement unraveled in 2023, starting Sudan’s current civil war.

Since 2023, the rsf has taken control of the Darfuri territory it made infamous years ago—and it began where it had left off. El Fasher, Darfur’s capital, was the last stronghold of the Sudanese Armed Forces. The rsf commenced with a year-and-a-half-long blockade of El Fasher. This was a deliberate policy of starvation against roughly 260,000 people, about half of whom are children.

“The toll on children is catastrophic,” an August United Nations report reads. “Since the start of the siege in April 2024, more than 1,100 grave violations have been verified in El Fasher alone, including the killing and maiming of over 1,000 children. Many were struck down in their homes, inside displacement camps, or in marketplaces. At least 23 children have been subjected to rape, gang rape or sexual abuse, while others have been abducted, recruited or used by armed groups.”

With El Fasher’s fall on October 26, the bloodshed has only accelerated. The bloodshed in El Fasher is so extensive that the sand stained by blood can be seen from space.

The rsf has not tried to hide its atrocities. Many of its members have uploaded footage of their actions, similar to what Hamas did after the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre. [The following videos are graphic; viewer discretion is advised.]

A local monitor estimates the rsf killed at least 1,500 people within the first three days of occupying El Fasher.

Where Is the Outrage?

What the rsf is doing in Darfur is what millions around the world accuse Israel of doing in Gaza. The charges against Israel are demonstrably false, as the Trumpet has covered repeatedly.

When the media claimed Israel was starving Palestinians, massacring children, and committing ethnic cleansing, hundreds of thousands packed the streets of London, Paris, New York, Sydney and other major Western cities in protest. Countries imposed arms embargoes on Israel. The International Criminal Court put out an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister. Jews in Western countries became targets of harassment and attacks. France, Britain, Canada, Australia and other Western countries recognized a Palestinian state. Spain implied it would use nuclear bombs against Israel if it could.

Accusations of genocide against Israel are easily disproved. Genocide in Darfur, Sudan, in contrast, is easily provable. It has been for decades. Yet what is the world’s reaction to the rsf’s actions?

Hundreds of thousands of people did not pack Trafalgar Square and the Champs Élysées. Organized mobs did not go hunting for innocent Sudanese expats living in the West. Nobody is threatening to intervene in Sudan to save the Darfuri. Greta Thunberg is not on a flotilla sailing down the Red Sea to raise awareness.

The rsf isn’t acting alone. The United Arab Emirates sponsors the rsf through continuous arms shipments. While the Sudanese government is at the moment close to Israel and the United States, it has historic ties to Iran. The U.A.E. has a rivalry with Iran and may be viewing the Sudanese conflict as an Iranian proxy war.

“The war would be over if not for the U.A.E.,” former U.S. diplomat Cameron Hudson told the Wall Street Journal. “The only thing that is keeping [the rsf] in this war is the overwhelming amount of military support that they’re receiving from the U.A.E.”

This is common knowledge among analysts. Yet there are no campaigns to boycott the U.A.E. There are no international blockades to force the U.A.E. to back down. Nobody is vandalizing U.A.E.’s embassies.

The rsf was trained by the European Union to stop the flow of migrants from Africa to Europe. The very militia executing literal genocide was trained by the same organization that is finger-wagging Israel for its war against Gaza.

The world is embroiled in a myriad of crises. Public outrage for Russia’s genocidal atrocities in Ukraine has visibly died down. China’s genocide of the Muslim Uyghurs is ongoing. So is Myanmar’s genocide against the Muslim Rohingya. Yet it is the nonexistent genocide in Gaza that is consuming the world’s attention. And it is the nonexistent culpability of Jews worldwide that is motivating people to attack Jews on the streets and to assault synagogues.

Attacking Israel has nothing to do with genocide. It is anti-Semitism, plain and simple. The hundreds of thousands crying out about human rights in Gaza don’t really care about human rights. If they did, they would be demonstrating against the rsf’s genocide of the Darfuri. Their silence is deafening.

Hope for Darfur

Since gaining independence from the British Empire in 1956, Sudan has alternated between totalitarian dictatorship and bloody anarchy. Perhaps many tune out the Darfur conflict because it’s been going on for so long and still nobody has a solution. Only the Bible offers the solution.

Bible prophecy forecasts the unprecedented cataclysm of the Great Tribulation to soon strike the world (Matthew 24:21-22). (Request a free copy of Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry’s booklet Nuclear Armageddon Is ‘At the Door’ for more information.) The Great Tribulation will hit prosperous Western nations especially hard. “But,” Trumpet managing editor Joel Hilliker wrote in the September 2017 issue, “there are people on Earth today who are already living through Tribulation-like nightmares.”

“You share this planet with 7.4 billion other people,” Mr. Hilliker wrote. “All of them desperately need God. And hundreds of millions of them, right this very moment, are suffering oppression and injustice that you may have a difficult time even imagining.”

The Darfuri people are one such group. The rsf’s recent massacres are only the latest in a long line of horrific abuses the Darfuri have endured for decades.

The Bible reveals that Satan is the present ruler of this world (2 Corinthians 4:4; Revelation 12:9). It can be hard to understand what exactly that means in our modern age of sophistication and luxury. The pools of Darfuri blood visible from space are a good reminder of what Satan’s rule is all about.

The same Bible that prophesies of the Great Tribulation also prophesies of the solution to mankind’s problems. Mankind’s escalating crises will culminate in the vision of Matthew 24:30-31: the return of Jesus Christ and the end of Satan’s rule on Earth.

Meditate on the following scriptures describing what Christ wants to give all of mankind:

• “Say to them that are of a fearful heart, Be strong, fear not: behold, your God will come with vengeance, even God with a recompence; he will come and save you” (Isaiah 35:4).
• “… they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the Lord of hosts hath spoken it” (Micah 4:3-4).
• “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away” (Revelation 21:4).

This is the hope the people of Darfur need. And while the Bible prophesies of tremendous problems to come in the short term, the hope beyond is just as sure.

“God has a marvelous plan to extend salvation to all people,” Mr. Hilliker wrote. “Jesus Christ died for all men, to be dealt with in due time [1 Timothy 2:5-6]. God will have all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. But right now this world is ruled by Satan, who would have all men to suffer and be destroyed. But God sees what is happening. And He promises to bring perfect justice—to all people.”

This is the vision humanity needs. This is the only vision that will ever bring true peace to the Earth. And if one turns in repentance and faith toward God, He will give them these blessings today.

To learn more, read Mr. Hilliker’s article “The World Needs Justice.”