Sudan’s civil war is taking a jarring turn in Darfur, where an Arab-led militia is now using state-of-the-art drones and execution squads to dominate the region’s Black population. Rights researchers already are warning that the killings have the potential to surpass the genocide that played out in Rwanda just over 30 years ago. The group behind the violence, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, has previously been accused by the U.S. of pursuing a genocide of Darfur’s Black population. Two decades ago, its predecessor was involved in the killing of more than 200,000 people in Darfur.

This time, the killings are the work of a closely-drilled and well-armed rebel force that already has established a parallel government to run Darfur, an expanse of western Sudan roughly the size of Spain. RSF fighters are armed with bomb-carrying Wing Loong II and FeiHong-95 drones, made in China, and supplied by the United Arab Emirates to help expand its own interests in the region.

The RSF have been conducting door-to-door searches, picking out non-Arab men and boys before executing them… Witnesses and residents say militia members swept through the city, raping Black women, detaining aid workers and forcing the last remaining residents to leave… Black women with long hair are systematically separated and raped, according to interviews with multiple aid workers and victims.

According to Eric Reeves, a fellow with the Nairobi-based Rift Valley Institute: “The fierce ethnic animus of the RSF toward non-Arab civilians is equal to that of the Hutus toward the Tutsis in Rwanda. The obscene violence is clearly comparable.”

Excerpt from Nicholas Bariyo, Sudan Militia, Armed With Drones, Hunts Down Black Population of Darfur, WSJ, Oct. 31, 2025