“Managing the Savage” — between ISIS and the Rapid Support Forces

by Al-Obaid Ahmad Murawih
A presenter on an Arabic TV talk show recently asked me how I explained what appears in videos from El Fasher: fighters from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) rejoicing in killing unarmed civilians while shouting “Allahu Akbar.”
I told him this behaviour stems from the nature of the war being waged against the Sudanese army and people. This is not a conventional conflict in which insurgents seek political concessions, nor is it a rebellion demanding a share of power or wealth — Sudan has seen such uprisings since before independence in 1956. Rather, it is an act of aggression against the Sudanese people intended to force them off their land and replace them with others from inside and outside the country. In short, it is a campaign of conquest and settlement.
From the first day of the current war, the Rapid Support Forces committed extreme violence: murder, rape, abduction and enforced disappearance across Khartoum and then in other states. They then “escalated” to mass killings and ethnic cleansing in West Darfur (Al-Geneina) and in Al-Gezira (Wad Al-Nour), precipitating one of the largest displacement crises in the world — UN agencies now put the number of displaced and refugees at some thirteen million.
The deliberate barbarity, filmed and publicised by the perpetrators themselves, is part of the tactic: to terrorise people into fleeing without fighting, abandoning homes, savings and vehicles that become spoils for the invaders. Thousands of women and girls have been enslaved and sexually assaulted — a fact documented by international press, rights organisations and investigative centres at several US universities.
After the interview, I recalled the ISIS (Daesh) years in Iraq and Syria: the Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh, locked in a metal cage and burned in 2014 — footage ISIS widely circulated — and the beheadings carried out under triumphant shouts of “takbīr”. At the time, we recognised that ISIS had a deliberate, named strategy: “managing brutality” — to broadcast extreme violence on social media to terrify populations and deter resistance.
The resemblance between ISIS’s conduct in its heyday and the behaviour of Rapid Support combatants in El Fasher is striking. Both commit atrocities, kill and loot in the name of justice or Islam, and both treat civilian lives, property and women as legitimate spoils.
This explanation of the Sudan war helps explain why much of the world has either ignored or misunderstood its true nature since April 2023. Observers still reduce it to a power struggle between two generals, a fight between the army and an insurgent force, or a contest against remnants of the old Islamist regime — but those are superficial readings. The events in El Fasher have exposed what the world chose to overlook for over thirty months.
For thirty months, the global narrative has been distorted by a powerful disinformation campaign run, funded and orchestrated by a state actor: the United Arab Emirates. Alongside shaping propaganda favourable to its allies and agents in Sudan, the UAE has sought to smear the Sudanese army, allied forces and civilian supporters — assigning them labels from a preprepared lexicon that fit only the UAE’s friends. That tactic is a textbook diversion: “cast the blame and slink away.”
The world, Arab and non-Arab alike, must recognise that it has been turning a blind eye to the evil represented by the Rapid Support Forces. The only way to contain this evil is to designate the Rapid Support Forces as a terrorist organisation, disarm it, prosecute its leaders for ethnic cleansing and war crimes, condemn and hold its sponsors and financiers to account, and set up internment centres for its foreign mercenaries — as the international community did with ISIS, for example by establishing Al-Hol camp in Syria while trials and repatriations proceed.
If these steps are not taken — if foreign fighters are not detained, tried or returned to their countries of origin and if Sudanese members of the militia are not subject to proper accountability — this cancer will not remain confined to Sudan. It will spread across Africa. Neither Europe nor the rest of the world will be spared.

Shortlink: https://sudanhorizon.com/?p=8674