PORT SUDAN, Sudan (AFP) -- More than seven months into Sudan’s devastating war that has killed thousands and displaced millions, experts warn that the scarred and impoverished country faces the threat of breaking apart.
The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) is waging war against the armed forces and there have been reports of new massacres in Sudan’s western Darfur region.
Experts now warn the country could face a “Libya scenario”, in reference to the north African country long divided between two rival administrations in its east and west.
“Continued fighting could lead to a few terrifying scenarios, including division,” said Khaled Omar Youssef, spokesman for the Forces of Freedom and Change, the main civilian bloc ousted from power in a 2021 joint coup by Sudan’s warring generals.
“The rising tide of militarization along ethnic and regional lines deepens social fissures in Sudan,” Youssef told AFP.
As it stands, the RSF is currently in control of much of the capital Khartoum and the Darfur region, while the army controls the country’s north and east.
Meanwhile, the army-aligned government has been all but exiled to the eastern city of Port Sudan.
With the two sides failing to make any headway at U.S.- and Saudi-brokered negotiations this month, some fear a new, fragmented status quo.
Since April 15, the war between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, has forced about six million people to flee both within Sudan and across borders.
By the end of last month, it had killed over 10,000 people, according to a conservative estimate by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.
But in November, new reports of massacres began to emerge amid a major offensive by the RSF in the vast Darfur region, where they quickly claimed control of army bases in all but one major city.
In Ardamata alone, in West Darfur, the United Nations reported that nearly 100 shelters housing displaced people were razed to the ground, with fighters going house to house killing civilians and more than 8,000 people fleeing to neighboring Chad in one week.
Preliminary reports indicate hundreds have been killed, but with Darfur under an ongoing communications blackout, civilians have struggled to document the full scale of the violence.
The European Union said on November 12 it was “appalled” by reports of more than 1,000 people killed in “just over two days”.
Organizations and civilians have both blamed the RSF and allied Arab militia, which have carried out a targeted campaign against the region’s Massalit tribes, including the assassination of tribal leaders.