Like lava pouring through his veins into his heart, Nodredin Ahmed Aissa remembered of the moment the knife cut through his limbs. Then, he watched as a prison guard paraded his amputated right arm and left leg before a cheering crowd. The brutal punishments began in the winter of 1983, as Sudan imposed Sharia law. Thousands of bottles of alcohol were poured into the Nile; women were stoned on suspicion of sex outside marriage; gender segregation was ruthlessly enforced; an Indian businessman, Lalitt Ratanlal Shah, lost his assets on charges of riba, or usury.
Three hundred men are reported to have lost one limb or more before the terror ended in December 1984 — their arms and legs cut off using specially imported knives, on the recommendation of a doctor sent to train in amputation techniques in Saudi Arabia.
Four decades after that time of horror — instituted to impose an Islamic national identity on a Sudan riven by religious and ethnic fractures — the country has suffered a partition, with its largely Christian south seceding. The endless hunger of hate is still being fed, though. This time, the killing involves Sudan’s Muslim communities, which have been targeted in a civil war that has claimed tens of thousands of lives since 2023.
Last week, insurgents of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) overran the town of al-Fashir in the western Darfur region, engaging in mass killings, rape, and brutal torture. Even patients at a maternity ward were slaughtered.
The slaughter offers a terrifying glimpse of what the world looks like when the international community and global institutions are happy to let mass killers rule. The group responsible for the butchery in al-Fashir is widely believed to have been equipped and funded by the United Arab Emirates, in a bid to prevent the Muslim Brotherhood from exercising power in Khartoum. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), for their part, have had the backing of both Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
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The unmaking of a nation
Like many post-colonial countries, as scholar Ali Bob noted, Sudan acquired nationhood before it became a nation.
Long a mosaic of multi-ethnic and multi-religious communities, the territories of northern Sudan were conquered by Ottoman Egypt in 1820-1821. Egypt could never establish full political control over the southern parts of Sudan, though, and English missionaries from Kenya became increasingly active in the late nineteenth century. The rule of Egypt was decisively overthrown in 1885 by the Islamic religious leader Muhammad Ahmad, who united central and western Sudan.
From 1898, imperial Britain took control of all the territories of modern Sudan — though the name of the country itself was simply borrowed from medieval Arab geographers, who used it to refer to the “land of the black people”. The British, as historian Gérard Prunier noted, committed little funding to modernising Sudan — and what little was spent went to the tribes of Khartoum and the Blue Nile province.
The new imperial colony defied simple categorisation. Although the tribes of Darfur are often distinguished as ethnically Black African as opposed to Arab, there is little to racially distinguish these labels, Prunier points out. The largely Christian south, similarly, shared a language and many cultural elements with its northern Islamic neighbours.
Following independence in 1955, Sudan crafted a constitution that sought to reconcile Islam with Christian and Animist traditions. The country’s élite, though, soon began to stifle the aspirations of the south through the use of Islam. This process of state-sponsored Islamisation soon sparked an insurgency.
The northern leadership refused to give ground. The Muslim Brotherhood leader Hassan al-Turabi proclaimed that “the South has no culture; thus, the vacuum would necessarily be filled by an Arab culture under an Islamic revival.”
Following a coup in 1969, military ruler Gaafar Muhammad al-Nimeiry sought a pragmatic reconciliation with the south. An accord signed with the southern rebels in 1972 promised respect for the region’s religion and customs. Facing economic crisis and demands for regional autonomy, however, al-Nimeiry declared himself Imam — the theocratic ruler of Sudan. The title, he claimed, entitled him to absolute obedience.
To secure the support of the Muslim Brotherhood and gain sponsorship from Saudi Arabia, al-Nimeiry declared an Islamic state. The institution of Sharia punishments was just part of a wider programme that hollowed out Sudan — among them, the abolition of income tax and the prohibition of interest. The severe economic crisis that followed brought about another coup in 1985, dethroning al-Nimeiry. Four years of failed democratisation later, another coup brought Brigadier Omar al-Bashir to power in 1989.
Like other theocratic states, Sudan’s dystopia would become ever more bizarre. In 2012, nine women were sentenced to public lashing simply for wearing trousers.
Land, faith, and terror
Even though al-Bashir conceded a referendum that led to the independence of oil-rich South Sudan in 2011, he continued to consolidate the Islamic state his predecessors had founded. Following his coup, al-Bashir appeared with a Kalashnikov rifle in one hand and the Quran in the other, vowing “to purge the enemies of the people and of the armed forces.” Together with al-Turabi, he reinstated harsh punishments. In 1999, courts in the town of Nyala were reported to have sentenced 18 people to hanging, amputation of the right hand and left leg, and crucifixion.
Al-Bashir’s regime provided safe haven to al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden. Al-Qaeda used its bases in Sudan to attempt the assassination of Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, and to support terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center. Though Sudan expelled bin Laden in 1996, frustrations over al-Bashir’s continued support for terrorism led the United States to bomb the country two years later.
Fighting, meanwhile, flared up in Darfur — evidence that religion was not enough to unite the country. Since the 1970s, members of pastoral tribes like the Rizeigat, Habbaniya, and Beni Halba — who identify as Arab — had settled in southern Darfur, escaping drought. From the mid-1980s, members of these tribes were recruited as militia in the fight against South Sudan’s secessionists. Armed and organised, these militias soon began grabbing land from local Black African tribes such as the Fur and Zaghawa.
The violence escalated, with the so-called Janjaweed militia — or “Evil Horsemen” — brutally killing and raping their rivals in Darfur. The RSF, led by Darfur-born “Arab” leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, grew out of the Janjaweed in 2013. An uprising led to al-Bashir’s overthrow in 2019. Then, in 2021, Dagalo allied with the SAF’s Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and staged yet another coup.
Little changed but the faces: Two years back, 20-year-old Mariam Tirab became the first woman to be sentenced to death by stoning under the SAF-RSF regime, on charges of zina, or adultery.
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Not the final act
Even though al-Bashir ended up in prison, Khartoum’s genocide management has proved successful. Following 9/11, the Central Intelligence Agency and MI6 began quiet counter-terrorism cooperation with Sudan’s secret service, according to Prunier. Later, Sudan’s military sent over 1,000 troops to fight alongside Saudi Arabia in Yemen, earning them the kingdom’s goodwill. Khartoum successfully ensured that United Nations peacekeepers would not be deployed in Darfur, allowing only troops from the African Union to operate on the ground.
Following the eviction of al-Bashir from power, the United Nations-African Union mission wound down — leaving Darfur and the rest of Sudan as entropic as before. Funding for emergency aid and reconstruction has fallen short; the RSF and SAF, though, are acquiring ever-more lethal weaponry.
The four-state alliance involved in diplomatic efforts to end the violence — the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt — has been pushing for a truce. There is no sign, though, that either the UAE or Saudi Arabia is willing to abandon its clients. The fall of al-Fashir complicates the process, setting in place a de facto partition of Sudan.
Fourteen million refugees, and 25 million facing acute hunger, should be reason enough for the world to dismantle the dystopia in Sudan — even if the sadism of its rulers is not. The lesson al-Fashir has sent, though, is that no kind of suffering is powerful enough to make the world act.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)