{"id":9632,"date":"2025-11-07T07:17:27","date_gmt":"2025-11-07T07:17:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/?p=9632"},"modified":"2025-11-07T07:17:27","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T07:17:27","slug":"grisly-horrors-unfolding-in-sudan-but-who-can-stop-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/?p=9632","title":{"rendered":"Grisly horrors unfolding in Sudan, but who can stop it?"},"content":{"rendered":"


By Suzanne Bowdey<\/span><\/span>, Op-ed contributor Thursday, November 06, 2025<\/span>A Sudanese Christian woman prays during a Sunday service at the All Saints Cathedral in the Sudanese capital Khartoum on Aug. 18, 2019. Sudan’s Christians suffered decades of persecution under the regime of Islamist general Omar al-Bashir. Now they hope his downfall will give the religious freedom they have long prayed for. <\/span> | JEAN MARC MOJON\/AFP via Getty Images<\/span><\/p>\n

After October 7, 2023, most of the world came to a new understanding of evil. The images of desecrated and charred bodies, grasses strewn with blood and abandoned belongings, a running soundtrack of screams at the hands of Hamas. But violence speaks every language, and the horrors unfolding in Sudan rival the nightmares of this century\u2019s worst massacres. And without the weight of the Western world, their slaughter is only the beginning. The situation, the United Nations\u00a0warns, is spiraling out of control.<\/p>\n

The horrors, so gruesome that even American news outlets cannot look away, are \u201cvisible from space\u201d \u2014 blood pooling on the ground, piles of human remains, lines of terrified people who could be next. After a year and a half of fighting, the city of El Fasher, which had been the last stronghold of the Sudanese military, fell \u2014 unleashing a wave of Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militants on the hundreds of thousands of innocents inside the city. As the sand wall around the city was toppled, armed men opened fire on the local people, mowing down helpless men, women, and children as others videotaped the rampage. \u201cThey would ask a man to run,\u201d one survivor said. \u201cOnce you start running, they shoot you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was like a killing field. Bodies everywhere and people bleeding and no one to help them,\u201d Tajal-Rahman told the Associated Press after he escaped to a nearby town. \u201cSome people were run over by vehicles,\u201d reiterated Saeeda, a 28-year-old woman. \u201cWhile we were on the road, they took girls from our group \u2014 choosing them and dragging them away.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trapped like caged animals, the locals were lined up and executed. In grisly footage uploaded by the RSF fighters, the carnage is chilling. \u201cOne, filmed near the berm, shows dozens of bodies on the ground and fighters with RSF insignia walking among them as vehicles burn nearby and sporadic gunfire pops off in the background. \u2018We killed them,\u2019 the man who took the video, which has been verified by NBC News, can be heard saying. \u2018They are just dust now.\u2019 Another shows an RSF commander, whom NBC News has identified as Abu Lulu, shooting at a line of men sitting on the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n

In eerie echoes of Hamas, the soldiers\u00a0went door to door through the houses, \u201cbeating and shooting\u201d at everyone inside. Some of the worst scenes took place at the city\u2019s only functioning hospital, where the World Health Organization can confirm that more than\u00a0460 patients, doctors, nurses, and staff were murdered in cold blood.<\/p>\n

For women and young girls, the terror is being caught alive. \u201cAt least 25 women were gang raped when RSF\u2019s forces entered a shelter for displaced people near El Fasher University. Witnesses confirm RSF\u2019s personnel selected women and girls and raped them at gunpoint,\u201d Seif Magango, spokesperson for the U.N. human rights office, said somberly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And there\u2019s no way to know the extent of these atrocities, since the area is under a complete communications blackout. What international aid groups do know is from the small number who escaped. Nathaniel Raymond, the executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, pored over the high-res satellite images, telling NBC News that the \u201c\u2018activity that suggests mass killing on a level that can only be compared to Rwanda,\u2019 where an estimated 800,000 people were killed in 1994 by armed militias from a rival ethnic group. \u2018We have never seen a velocity of violence at this scale,\u2019 he said in a telephone interview Wednesday, adding that his team could see bodies piling up in the streets in satellite images, pools of blood around them.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Outside of the children\u2019s hospital, Raymond worried that the images taken on Monday \u201cshowed dark dots consistent with people lining up. Nearby, he said, there was a cluster of \u2018white objects,\u2019 presumably bodies lying on the ground.<\/p>\n

\u2018We\u2019re in the tens of thousands in terms of all the body-consistent objects on the ground,\u2019 Raymond [shook his head]. \u2018They are moving like a wood chipper, and they are killing everything that moves.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Surrounded by desert, there is no easy place to run to. While close to a quarter million people were living in El Fasher last August, the United Nations estimated that 62,000 had fled in the week, but only a fraction \u2014 5,000 \u2014 had made it the 40 miles to Tawila by Friday. \u201cThe arrival numbers don\u2019t add up, while accounts of large-scale atrocities are mounting,\u201d Michel Olivier Lacharit\u00e9, MSF head of emergencies,\u00a0worried. \u201cWhere are they? Where are the rest? It\u2019s extremely concerning and disturbing,\u201d Doctors Without Borders\u2019s Sylvain Penicaud\u00a0told\u00a0The New York Times\u2019s Pranav Baskar by phone. \u201dOur fear is that these people have been detained for extortion or got killed.\u201d Or, Shashwat Saraf\u00a0speculated\u00a0grimly, \u201cWe feel that a lot of people are stuck in locations from where it is not safe for them to move, and they need to pay to move, and they don\u2019t have money to pay.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most who made it to the town were starving, disoriented, and dehydrated, but others, \u201cincluding gunshot victims, traveled on foot, hiding by daylight and trekking at night to avoid armed men along main roads,\u201d the Times\u00a0notes. Top U.N. humanitarian official Tom Fletcher told the Security Council on Thursday that \u201c\u2018women and girls are being raped, people being mutilated and killed with utter impunity.\u2019 Hundreds who\u2019ve made it to relative safety have untreated bullet wounds, \u2018and many bear signs of torture,\u2019\u201d medics are telling relief workers. Scores of children, many who are now orphans, are being picked up and carried to safety by escaping strangers. Thousands are unaccounted for, trapped inside El Fasher, where witnesses describe \u201cwidespread executions and routine [shelling].\u201d \u201cIf people are still in El Fasher, it will be very difficult for them to survive,\u201d one of the refugee camp organizers\u00a0warned.<\/p>\n

For Sudan, it\u2019s another tragedy in a long history of tragedies. The country\u2019s civil war \u2014 long considered one of the worst humanitarian crises in history \u2014 was a genocidal bloodbath, a time when the word \u201cDarfur\u201d reverberated across Africa as the darkest of chapters. After a period of brief peace under the transitional government in 2020, the country seemed to be turning a corner \u2014 repealing its dangerous apostasy law and inching toward a culture of religious tolerance. Two years later, the nation was plunged back into chaos when fighting broke out between RSF\u2019s leadership and the Sudanese military, reigniting the wave of terrorism against innocent civilians.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yale\u2019s Raymond \u201csaid he feared the paramilitary group, which grew out of the notorious Janjaweed Arab militias that carried out a genocide during the Darfur conflict in the 2000s, was \u2018finishing the liquidation of Darfur.\u2019 \u2018This is the final battle of the Darfur genocide,\u2019\u201d he warned.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Declan Walsh, the Times\u2019 chief Africa correspondent, knows that today is not the early 2000s. The people of Sudan are hunted as never before. \u201cThe first time Darfur tipped into chaos, there was at least some degree of Western pressure. This time,\u201d he writes sadly, \u201cthere\u2019s little celebrity activism or political attention, and impunity for abuses is rife. The fighters rampaging across Darfur are armed, organized and funded better than ever. And they are backed by one of the wealthiest countries in the wider region, the United Arab Emirates, which is also a close partner of the United States. (The Emirates has denied backing either side in the conflict.).\u201d Then, Walsh emphasized, \u201cfighters rode mainly on horses and camels; today, they drive armored vehicles and pickups. Before, they torched villages; now, they fire heavy artillery and fly sophisticated drones.\u201d<\/p>\n

In April of 2023, when the country began to unravel, church leaders were desperate for help. \u201cWe feel forgotten,\u201d they said, even then. \u201cThe situation is deteriorating every day, and there is no response from the world. There is a strong feeling of abandonment,\u201d they told Open Doors. \u201cThere is no security, no protection. Not from the warring parties or from opportunists who will use this situation to further their own agendas. Christians, churches have been attacked with impunity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Walsh notes that President Trump is doing everything he can to stop the killing, even pressing his special advisor in Africa to try to negotiate a ceasefire. \u201cBut so far there has been little sign of success. One reason is that participants include diplomats from the Emirates, Egypt and Saudi Arabia \u2014 the same Arab powers that are fueling the conflict.\u201d These entanglements only complicate the administration\u2019s work, while families are pinned down, starving, in a town crawling with fighters who want them dead.<\/p>\n

Maybe, Senator James Risch (R-Idaho) and others argue, the president could declare RSF a\u00a0foreign terrorist organization, which would unlock new ways to pressure Sudan to end the slaughter. \u201cThat would be a good start,\u201d the editorial board of The Washington Post\u00a0agreed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s difficult to imagine the suffering happening there right now,\u201d Family Research Council\u2019s Arielle Del Turco told The Washington Stand, \u201cand difficult to comprehend the scope of the issue with hundreds of thousands of civilians unaccounted for. Christians should pray for a supernatural peace in Sudan, for the protection of innocent civilians, and that people\u2019s hearts would turn to the Lord in the midst of this atrocity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Something must be done \u2014 before\u00a0everyone in El Fasher is lost. Just as the United States cannot sit by and watch the brutal savagery against the Uyghurs in China, the Christians in Nigeria, and the Jews in Israel, it cannot turn a blind eye here. Indifference, against this evil, is deadly.<\/p>\n

Originally published at The Washington Stand.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer for The Washington Stand.\u00a0In her role, she drafts commentary on topics such as life, consumer activism, media and entertainment, sexuality, education, religious freedom, and other issues that affect the institutions of marriage and family. Over the past 20 years at FRC, her op-eds have been featured in publications ranging from the Washington Times to The Christian Post. Suzanne is a graduate of Taylor University in Upland, Ind., with majors in both English Writing and Political Science.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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