EL GENEINA, SUDAN—Once crowded, El Geneina’s main street was empty other than a few pedestrians in civilian dress, but with AK-47s slung over their shoulders. As our car drove across West Darfur’s capital in October, I was trying to remember the buildings that, two years ago, were packed with displaced people.
In 2021, local Arab militias, including members of Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), had stormed the nearby camp of Kirinding, which was then hosting some 50,000 civilians. The displaced had found shelter in the town itself, in more than 80 buildings, including schools, ministries, and courts, which they filled with hastily built huts of branches and straw.
The compounds were now deserted, their walls riddled with bullet holes. The displaced had been displaced again, now to neighboring Chad, only 20 miles away. They mostly belong to the Masalit community, the main non-Arab tribe in West Darfur, which once ruled over a powerful precolonial sultanate.
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A woman wearing a scarf around her head and shoulders walks amid the burned out shell of a house, frowning with her face turned down toward the ground. - A displaced woman visits the burned houses in El Geneina, West Darfur, on Feb. 14, 2021.
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A woman wearing bright printed fabric draping her head and body appears to weep, wiping her face with the edge of her scarf, as she stands amid burned houses. - A woman reacts to the damage in El Geneina.
In theory, there was no reason for the Masalit, with few armed forces nor influence in national politics, to be victims of the conflict between the regular army and the RSF, both focusing on control of remote Khartoum. But the war did not spare Darfur, and in El Geneina, it immediately took an ethnic turn. The RSF is largely made of Darfuri Arab militias, the same or similar to those known as the janjaweed that had displaced the non-Arab communities 20 years ago alongside the army.
In El Geneina over the past nine months, whether part of the RSF or acting on their own, Arab fighters had enough arms to settle their accounts with the Masalit. Meanwhile, the army, led by officers from central Sudan, did not seem to care about protecting Darfuri civilians. More than 5,000 Masalit were reportedly killed in June, and the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Adre, Chad, received 1,000 injured people in a week. A retrospective mortality survey conducted in a new camp in Chad, where most refugees came from El Geneina, found that the death rate had multiplied twentyfold between the beginning of the crisis and the survivors’ arrival in Chad, and more than 80 percent of the deaths had been caused by violence.
Members of the Masalit community display their protective charms in El Geneina in February 2021. Some members of the self-defense militia were killed after fighting broke out again in April 2023, while others took refuge in Chad.
After that first wave of killings, the new administration of El Geneina, dominated by Arabs and close to the RSF, has been trying to send signs of appeasement. The Masalit are welcome to return, several officials told me. But not in town itself, some added. They accused the disgruntled Masalit youth born in the displaced camps of having formed criminal gangs known as “Colombians.” Some specified that the Masalit should not live less than six miles from El Geneina. But in rural areas, they’re likely to lack essential services (such as water healthcare, and education) and often suffer exploitative practices, such as giving up a share of their harvest in order not to be attacked, as has been common in Darfur in the last 20 years. Under such conditions, their return might not come anytime soon.
As I was driving back to the Chadian border after a week in El Geneina, I saw a truck full of people stopped at a military checkpoint, likely to pay taxes. A couple of weeks later, in early November, about 10,000 people—mostly Masalit civilians—followed them when Ardamata, a Masalit neighborhood on the outskirts of El Geneina where survivors had taken refuge around the army garrison, was evacuated by the regular army forces and attacked by RSF forces and Arab militias as well. Up to 2,000 people were reportedly killed.
Children jump rope at the Adre transit camp in Chad on Oct. 17, 2023.
Adre, once a small Chadian border post, looked like a small city when I visited in October. Its so-called transit camp hosts more than 120,000 refugees, waiting for the UNHCR to register them and move them to official refugee camps, where the pace of construction struggles to keep up with new arrivals. For now, the refugees have built tents with branches covered with plastic tarpaulins, women’s clothing, and cardboard. It seems almost as if all of El Geneina—at least all Masalit, the majority of the town’s population—have moved to Adre.
Some 120 miles farther north, the border crossing of Tina—with only a dry riverbed to cross between the Sudanese town and its Chadian twin—has also been welcoming refugees daily, many coming from much more remote places than El Geneina. A few miles outside the Chadian town, similar shelters to those in Adre have been built by about 1,500 refugees around an empty concrete fence.
The morning I visited, Abderrahman, who arrived the night before with his family of six other refugees (three women and three children), was erecting a frame made of branches and covering them with plastic sheeting. It would likely be their home for some weeks or months—the time that UNHCR needs to move them to a regular camp, where they will receive some relief—food, water, a better tent, blankets and some medical assistance.
For now, his 20-year-old niece, Manahil, helped him build the shelter in spite of injuries to her shoulder and arm from the bombing that destroyed their house one week before, in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur and Sudan’s second-largest city. But no health care was available in the camp, and refugees had to pay for water delivered from the town on trucks.
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A woman wearing a blue scarf sits on the dusty ground next to a cloth shelter erected amid branches at an informal camp in Tina, Sudan. Children and other people are seen behind the cloth wall, which is thin and nearly transparent. - A woman sits next to a cloth shelter erected amid branches at the informal camp in Tina on Oct. 22, 2023.
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An older woman wearing a dark headscarf and white shirt examines a large, uncovered wound on the shoulder of Manahil, a 20-year-old woman wearing a printed headscarf and bright pink dress. - A woman examines the wounds of Manahil, a 20-year-old who crossed the Sudanese border, at the Tina camp on Oct. 22, 2023. She was injured by an aerial bombing of her neighborhood in Nyala, more than 300 miles away.
Abderrahman then had to walk into Tina to find work while I stayed to speak with Manahil under a tree.
The Darfur war first displaced her family from their village 20 years ago, “when I was still breastfed,” she said, so she has no memory from that first war. The new war is the first that she saw. Her neighborhood was controlled by soldiers from the RSF, who were “entering houses, looting properties, and whipping or killing those resisting,” she told me. “They also kidnapped many girls in our area, until now they haven’t come back.”
The family left town after an army plane bombed their neighborhood. Her three brothers were killed, and six members of the family were injured. They saved the food they could from their kitchen, separated from the rest of the house by a heap of rubble. Across a hole, they could see RSF soldiers looting their clothes in the living room. At the city’s exit, the RSF also took the phones and money of those leaving.
The 300-mile journey to Chad, on a pickup truck with 15 passengers, lasted a week. She couldn’t remember how many checkpoints—controlled by the RSF, unidentified Arab militias, or non-Arab rebel groups—they crossed. Each time, the driver had to pay. Now the family is broke and can’t move further.
A pickup truck full of people on the move around the Sudan-Chad border on Oct. 20, 2023.
“We only want a quiet place here in Chad,” Manahil said. “Unlike the others, we don’t want to migrate.” She pointed at a group of young men, university students who said they were on their way to Europe to resume their interrupted studies.
In the town of Tina itself, I met similar refugees on the road. Mohamed, 27, and Ilham, 20, are a recently married student couple from Khartoum’s middle class. He had studied computer science; she was still in high school but hoping to study the same subject. For them, too, it was their first time seeing fighting; indeed, this war is the first of Sudan’s almost continuous conflicts since independence in 1956 to engulf the capital city, which historically had been a place of refuge for displaced people from the peripheries.
“We realized it would last years, and that we were eating the little money we had,” Mohamed said. In July, they decided to leave with what remained. In Kosti, a city on the Nile to the south of Khartoum, for about $100 each, they joined the monthly convoy to Darfur, escorted by former rebels who were presenting themselves as neutral in the ongoing conflict.
A month after they left Khartoum, they reached Tina. “It was still the good season to take the sea, but we had no more money,” said Mohamed, referring to the journey across the Mediterranean. He began working as a day laborer, cutting grass in the bush for the livestock. In the convoy, most of their fellow passengers had wanted to go to Europe, Mohamed said: “Some already reached Libya, then Tunisia, from where crossing is cheaper. One is now in France. I know the risks, but we will continue. I know that in Libya, there are prisons where they call your parents so that they pay a ransom. I know that at sea, it’s between life and death, but we have no other solution.”
Mohamed and Ilham at one stop on their way to Europe at the Tina refugee camp on Oct. 20, 2023.
As soon as they have money, the two will travel with Khalil, a pseudonym for a smuggler based in Tina, whose phone number they had been given when they were still in Khartoum. The 37-year-old Sudanese man came to Chad as a refugee himself 20 years ago. In 2014, as there was no work in the camp where he was staying, he began to work as a driver to support his family. Gold had recently been discovered in the borderlands between Chad and Libya, and new routes were opened. Drivers such as Khalil began carrying both miners and migrants, dropping them at the border, from where the latter were quickly entrusted to Libyan smugglers.
Last year, Khalil turned himself from smuggler to migrant, traveling with his jobless younger brother, “who had heard some were crossing the sea and succeeding in life.” They reached the gold mines without enough money to continue. They looked for gold, got 30 grams (worth about $1,500), and continued to Zawiya, a main departure hub on the Libyan coast.
Then they decided that it was better not to risk both their lives at sea. Khalil gave up his share of the gold and returned to Chad. His brother carried on, but his boat was intercepted by the Libyan Coast Guard, which is supported by the European Union in order to decrease flows of migrants toward Europe. He was brought back to Libya, then decided to go to Algeria and, like many Sudanese asylum-seekers, entered Morocco, from where he made three unsuccessful attempts to reach Spain. This year, he managed to get on a plane to Turkey and is now in Greece.
Khalil resumed driving gold-miners and migrants. He said he’s been doing well since the war broke out in Sudan; the number of passengers has increased, and rates have doubled between North Darfur’s capital El Fasher and Tina.
Tracks at the Chad-Libya border in February 2019.
By the end of December 2023, more than 7 million Sudanese had been displaced by the new war. Among them, 1.3 million sought refuge outside Sudan, nearly half of them in Chad and 380,000 in Egypt. Depending on sources, only 5,000 to 14,000 officially made it to Libya, but many more likely crossed the largely unpatrolled Libyan border, including through Chad. New routes opened and older ones were reactivated, from Chad to Libya, as well as to Niger, then Algeria, then Tunisia. Gold mines in the Saharan borderlands acted as hubs; there, migrants could quickly shift from a Chadian truck to a Libyan taxi, or from a Nigerien smuggler to an Algerian one.
Many Sudanese quickly reached Tunisia, and unlike other African migrants, they had no intention to stay and work. They went directly to Sfax, the main departure hub along the Mediterranean coast—only 117 miles from the small Italian island of Lampedusa—and camped in city parks.
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The local population was not so happy. It was alleged that on July 3, a Sudanese refugee (though other sources alleged it was two Cameroonians) killed a Tunisian man. The incident became the trigger for local mobs that rounded up Black Africans in an attempt to expel them from Tunisia’s second city. The police, pretending to offer protection, put the migrants into vehicles amid racist shouting by locals, before deporting them to the Libyan border. As many as 1,200 people were stranded in the no man’s land between Tunisian and Libyan forces for a week, and some remained for more than a month.
It became a deadlock, with Tunisian and Libyan forces playing ping-pong with the migrants before eventually striking a deal to share them between the two countries. There were reports of nearly 30 deaths, including from violence and thirst. At first, the only water available was from the sea.
The European Union remained astoundingly silent during the waves of violence against Black Africans in Tunisia. While they were taking place, the European Commission and some members states (chiefly Italy and the Netherlands) struck a cooperation deal with Tunisia, including a migration component described by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen as a “blueprint” for future similar deals. It is mostly aimed at paying Tunisia more than $115 million to tighten its borders to prevent migrants leaving by sea and to accept the “readmission” of those Tunisians who succeed in crossing. (In 2023, more than 60 percent of sea arrivals to Italy had come from Tunisia, rather than Libya—as had been common in the past).
Darfurian and other migrants at the Dhar el-Jebel detention center in Libya in June 2019.
I visited southern Tunisia in August. The UNHCR noted a sharp increase around then of Sudanese registration in the country, as well as of Sudanese asylum-seekers crossing from Tunisia to Italy. During a morning of medical consultations I attended at a UNHCR center, of 20 patients, 19 were Sudanese. Six had left Sudan after the war began, including three who had reached Tunisia in about a month. Six had foot injuries from having walked too much.
Among them, Issa, who preferred not to use his real name, had left his displaced camp near El Fasher 40 days before. He said he had been pushed back to Libya three times by Tunisian border guards and had then gone from Libya to Algeria before walking 450 miles to the Tunisian coast. Among those who had spent longer on the road, Abdallah had left Khartoum in 2017, spending seven years in Libya and only coming to Tunisia after 12 failed attempts to cross the sea, generally followed by stays in Libyan detention centers. “Each time, I had to pay a bribe, or to escape,” he said.
Ismail, from Nyala, decided to go to Libya even though his father, who made the journey first, was jailed for five months and tortured for ransom until he died. The family did not have enough money to get him released, even after selling their house. “I left Sudan in 2021. I didn’t have enough information on Libya but knew my father’s story. I had to be ready for anything,” he said.
He failed to cross the sea and went on to Morocco, where he tried more than 10 times to climb the walls surrounding the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. “My life was like that of a gazelle running from a lion. I tried to reach Europe from Libya and failed. From Morocco, I failed too. Then I found lots of migrants were coming to Tunisia. Everywhere there’s just a small hole to reach Europe, migrants go through.” A month later, he messaged me after arriving in Lampedusa.
In the past, most Sudanese used to try to make a living in Libya. But the increasing violence in the country has pushed more to cross the sea. The same thing took place this year in Tunisia, in spite of increasing interceptions by the coast guard.
An RSF vehicle at a desert camp in North Darfur guards the road to Libya in October 2020.
There is a bitter irony in seeing Europe again panicked by growing migrant flows, including from Sudan, transiting through its new model partner, Tunisia. Indeed, in 2016, Sudan itself had become a main EU partner on migration, with the capital hosting the headquarters of the EU’s regional “Khartoum Process.”
The EU was then accused of cooperating with a regime whose president, Omar al-Bashir, was indicted by the International Criminal Court for genocide; and with his then-trusted, RSF, which he had specifically tasked to control migration, and whose leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo—also known as Hemeti—repeatedly bragged that he was arresting migrants on behalf of Europe.
The EU only admitted to working with the police, which also included a paramilitary component involved in crimes in Darfur—namely, the Central Reserve Police, a force that’s now under U.S. sanctions for killing pro-democracy protesters in Khartoum in 2022.
Whether regular or not, some of the Sudanese forces that benefited from Europe’s financial (or at least political) support to fight migration are now fighting each other, and provoking new refugee flows.
Migrants carry their belongings as they move through the camp in Adre on Oct. 17, 2023.
Sudanese refugees know they have high chances of success at getting asylum in Europe and North America, in particular since the latest war started. The United States, France, and other nations see them as perfectly legitimate refugees. In August, the U.S. government extended its temporary protected status for Ukrainian and Sudanese nationals through 2025.
Since July, the French asylum appeal court also granted similar temporary protection status to several Sudanese refugees from Khartoum and Darfur whose asylum claims had first been rejected, arguing their regions of origin were in “a situation of blind violence of exceptional intensity”—thus creating legal precedents for anyone from the same regions to get protection, at least temporarily.
Maybe because its decisions are too generous in the eyes of the current government, that court is now under attack from the interior minister, whose new law on immigration (hardened and approved on Dec. 19) is set to reduce typical asylum appeal panels of three judges—one representing the UNHCR—to only one. It also reintroduced into French law an infraction known as “illegal stay,” while the new European Commission Pact on Migration and Asylum, agreed upon the same night, will allow detention of some asylum-seekers at the EU’s external borders. UNHCR head Filippo Grandi congratulated the EU, tweeting his readiness to support.
The temporary protection status is based on older, more generous EU laws, most notably a 2001 directive allowing immediate protection, rather than detention, in case of mass displacement, which was enforced for the first time in the case of Ukraine in March 2022. Together with measures facilitating Ukrainians’ entry and circulation within Europe, this allowed more than 4 million Ukrainians to receive immediate protection in the EU. But there seems to be little appetite in Europe to expand the Ukrainian exception to other war-torn countries.
Sudanese migrants still have to reach Europe by themselves and face obstacles—across the Sahara, the Mediterranean, or the Alps between Italy and France—that are not only natural, but also caused by European policies. The EU has been gradually building a network of both physical and legal walls south of the Mediterranean, harming both economic migrants and political refugees, violating both the U.N.’s 1990 convention on the rights of migrant workers and its 1951 Geneva refugee convention, and using all kinds of excuses—from COVID-19 to the war in Ukraine—to make exceptional measures permanent—in effect, as Foreign Policy pointed out at the height of COVID-19, the end of asylum as a practical possibility. Now the new EU pact uses the vague concept of “crisis” to allow members states to ignore their asylum obligations.
Europe’s reaction to the new Sudanese war was not particularly vocal other than recognizing that it was also a refugee crisis, merging with Europe’s existing migration crisis. Calling for much-needed funding for the new refugees, the U.N., to which the EU is a major donor, did not hesitate to play on Europe’s fears; the reasoning being that Europe’s interest was to keep the refugees in the camps in Chad, and thus fund relief or face increasing flows.
But once in Chad, the newcomers quickly realized that those who preceded them 20 years before had suffered from the fickleness of the aid sector, which is always moving from one crisis to the next. When rations had decreased, many had decided to travel to find work (from gold-mining in the Sahara to cheap labor industries in Europe) and send remittances to their families in the camps.
UNHCR resettlement processes remained extremely limited because of the lack of slots in Europe and North America. Everywhere I went, in Chad, Libya, or Tunisia, I heard of a few cases of Sudanese resettled to the United States or Canada—but some had waited 20 years, and others were still waiting.
UNHCR admits being compelled to look for “durable solutions” within those three African countries, even though they are neither durable, nor solutions. In Libya as in Tunisia, even refugees registered by UNHCR have been arrested—including by being rounded up when they were camping or protesting in front of the U.N. agency’s offices—before being detained or deported.
Among those who travelled to Tina with Mohamed, the computer science student, some registered as refugees in Chad in the hope that they’d be resettled, then changed their minds and are now in Libya or Tunisia.
Khalil, the smuggler, knows he won’t be short of clients: “Some applied to resettlement since 2003 and never left,” he told me. “Legal migration is too difficult.”