As a Christian my heart bleeds for the suffering around the world as Christians are being persecuted and slaughtered it seems on a daily basis. We in the US are fortunate, but it could happen here. China, Nigeria, Middle East and other places our dear brothers and sisters are being martyred for the cause of Christ. May God be with them in Nigeria in particular. Rh
In the grip of constant terror, Africans have become a people of suffering, living on high alert as armed gangs spill blood from the sands of Sudan to the churches of the Congo. In Nigeria, which has gotten the lion’s share of the attention thanks to pop star Nicki Minaj’s personal crusade, men with machetes and rifles gunned down more Christians on Wednesday, turning a house of worship into a place of terror. Children’s screams rip through the air in the footage of the massacre, as the pastor and other people are rushed away to an unknown fate in a horror story that never seems to end.
Two thousand miles away in El Fasher, the city has been transformed into a “crime scene,” the United Nations warns. On the ground, humanitarian workers continue to be shocked by the harrowing scenes playing out at the hands of the Rapid Special Forces (RSF). Apart from the thousands of men, women, and children executed in cold blood, a picture of brutal sexual torture is starting to emerge from the survivors who made it to help in the refugee camp 40 miles away. One by one, they recount the barbaric rapes RSF committed in front of their families and children.
“Any woman who resisted the rape was subjected to beatings, torture, or even killed. An 11-year-old boy was beaten to death while trying to help his mother,” one told the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. Others talked of being tied to trees while men violated them over and over again in front of their families. “One man could not afford the ransom [to leave the city], so they took his daughters and raped them.” Another mother recalled the shame and humiliation of being gang-raped in front of her 12-year-old daughter. “I feel shattered,” she cried. Even a nurse trying to treat the wounded men was taken captive and raped so many times that she fell unconscious.
U.N. officials like Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher have rushed to help the people in nearby Tawila and are at a loss for words when it comes to the suffering there. The region is “an absolute horror show,” he says in disbelief in a post from the camp on Monday. “I’ve had a week inside Darfur, which is now the epicenter of human suffering in the world,” Fletcher shakes his head. Desperate to explain the urgency of the situation, he pleads with leaders of the West to act. “We have a moment of opportunity if the world is ready to seize it. Civilians must be protected. Access must be expanded. Flow of arms must be limited,” he implores, referring to U.A.E.’s supply of deadly weapons and drones to the RSF.
“The international community has a clear duty to act,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNCHR) Volker Turk urged on Friday. Meanwhile, the slaughter marches east at an alarming pace, local groups warn, as the paramilitary group starts to invade Kordofan, launching rockets, air strikes, and mobilizing more ground forces. “Residents have been besieged in the towns of Babanousa, Dilling, and Kadugli ‘with access to food, water, and health services rapidly deteriorating,’” UNCHR reiterated in an update. Any hopes of security for the local population are “rapidly deteriorating,” before reporting that the civilian casualties “are particularly high in Bara, Babanousa, Ghubeish, and Umm Krediem…”
NBC cautioned earlier this month that the RSF is already “shifting its focus eastward after consolidating its grip over Darfur last month, reigniting violence and launching drone attacks across the country’s oil-producing southern areas.” Like El Fasher, where the roving troops mowed down locals, running over the ones who ran with their trucks, the people in Bara are being fired on indiscriminately. Innocents are rounded up and shot in rows, eyewitnesses say. “Mohamed said that when RSF troops arrived at his house, he could hear his father fighting back and being fatally shot outside the door. … He left the city on foot, hiding from fighters and vehicles,” he testified. “Another man, Ismail, described hiding inside a house as men were shot in the street, until he was able to pay a fighter to escort him and his family out of the city.” Across the east, “Witnesses and sources have reported signs of a broader military build-up.”
Fortunately, the bloodshed has caught the attention of the Trump administration, where Secretary of State Marco Rubio is working frantically behind the scenes to negotiate a ceasefire. Like most Sudan experts, Kholood Khair, founding director of the Confluence Advisory, insists that the RSF’s crimes meet “all the legal and political criteria for genocide.” In a wide-ranging interview about how Sudan devolved into a “humanitarian catastrophe” with The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner Tuesday, Khair argues that what’s happening in the country now is “far, far worse” than what happened in Darfur 20 years ago.
“Sudan’s a very racist country. Let me say that from the outset. The reason that we have had so many wars in Sudan that are all based on ethnicity is because the Sudanese state has never created a common Sudanese national identity. But now civilians are being forced into choosing a side simply out of survival. And that is what’s going to make it very difficult, even if there is a ceasefire at some point, to create coexistence in communities.”
As for the U.A.E.’s involvement, Khair isn’t optimistic that the Arab nation will walk away from its investment in RSF quite so easily. The Arab nation “needs Sudan itself. Sudan is the holy grail for the U.A.E. in many ways. It has flat arable land. The U.A.E. does not have much farmland. Sudan is one of Africa’s largest producers of gold. The U.A.E. has become a hub for gold globally. Sudan has a long Red Sea coastline. It’s an entry point from the Red Sea to the rest of Africa. The U.A.E. has been even outspending China in the Horn and in the east of Africa. I think the U.A.E. sees Sudan as the gateway to Africa, and it sees Africa as the gateway to its financial domination as it’s looking to move beyond oil.”
But the funneling of high-tech drones, rockets, and weapons to a bloodthirsty RSF bent on raping and murdering its way through Africa must stop. In an interesting twist, President Donald Trump said this week that his visit with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman has persuaded him to use his influence to stop the killing in Sudan. “It was not on my charts to be involved in that,” the president admitted. But, he recounted, “Working with the crown prince was amazing because he said, ‘Sir, you’re talking about a lot of wars, but there’s a place on Earth called Sudan, and it’s horrible what’s happening.’ We’re working on that,” the president insisted. ‘… I view it differently now than I did just a day ago.”
Even in places where the Trump administration has been successful in negotiating an end to civil war, like the blockbuster peace deal between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Christians are still targets. Just last week, Islamist militants from the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) stormed a health center run by Catholic nuns and shot 15 people before setting fire to the clinic, killing several moms in the maternity ward.
“Before destroying everything, they looted all the medical supplies — I believe that was their main objective,” Father Giovanni Piumatti recounted. “Panic spread everywhere. The army pursued them, but despite its efforts, the terrorists escaped. They seem to be better armed and equipped than the regular forces.” He paused before describing the harrowing scene.
“What is most tragic — beyond the sheer number of innocent victims — is the way they kill,” he said somberly. “They slit civilians’ throats, decapitate them — it’s horrific. Here they killed mothers as they were breastfeeding their babies. These massacres are beyond imagination, and they happen almost every week. Many go unreported.”
On Sunday, Pope Leo XIV called on the world to intervene. “While I entrust the victims to God’s loving mercy, I pray for the wounded and for Christians around the world who continue to suffer violence and persecution. I urge those with responsibilities at both local and international levels to work together to prevent such tragedies.”
That’s the hope of MEMRI, an organization that’s been tracking the escalating violence across the continent. In a new report called “Not Just Nigeria,” it documents the scale of the trauma in Africa. (Warning: the research includes several graphic photographs.) “Not a day goes by without the MEMRI JTTM team documenting jihadi reports of attacks on African Christians. Yet this ongoing terror and slaughter of Christians outside the West has largely gone unnoticed, with little to no action from those who have the power to speak out or intervene.”
They want people to know that a “typical day” for Christians in Africa often includes “being forced to pay the jizyah poll tax imposed on non-Muslims living under Islamic rule, facing a choice between conversion to Islam or death, witnessing their churches destroyed and villages burned, and seeing their priests and nuns beheaded or otherwise murdered. While most of these attacks are carried out by ISIS affiliates, others are perpetrated by Al-Qaeda and its supporters in the region, or by Islamist Fulani militias that continue to target Christian communities.”
The reality is, Africa has entered “a new era of war,” The Wall Street Journal laments. In a shocking statistic, the continent is now experiencing a “corridor of conflict” that stretches across 4,000 miles and spans 16 of the 54 countries. “In its wake lies incalculable human suffering — mass displacement, atrocities against civilians and extreme hunger — on a continent that is already by far the poorest on the planet.” The trail it has carved is one of “death and destruction “across the breadth of Africa — from Mali near the continent’s western edge all the way to Somalia on its eastern Horn.”
And sadly, WSJ notes, “Africa’s current conflicts haven’t prompted the outpouring of sympathy in the West that accompanied Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or the outrage ignited by Israel’s war in Gaza. … That lack of popular attention has translated into a dearth of political action to resolve wars in Africa or alleviate the suffering.”
For the nightmare to end, America’s voice must be louder and clearer than ever before. “Please,” one aid worker pleaded, “we are dying before the eyes of the whole world and no one is speaking up.” Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.
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