My heart bleeds on this reporting trip as I see skeletal Sudanese children and interview survivors of massacres and mass rape targeting Black African ethnic groups. I keep thinking: It can’t get worse than this.

Then I realize: Oh, yes, it can.

The most brutal militia in Sudan (a high bar) is the Rapid Support Forces, which is now bombarding the city of El Fasher and gaining ground. El Fasher and the nearby Zamzam camp could fall at any time, with more than a million civilians vulnerable to the kind of atrocities that the militiamen have committed many times before.

President Biden this week met the leader of the United Arab Emirates, the prime backer of the Rapid Support Forces as they commit atrocities. Biden praised the United Arab Emirates as a nation “always looking to the future” without offering a peep of public reproach for enabling a well-documented ethnic cleansing that at least one watchdog group has called a genocide.

The passivity of world leaders, even as they gather at the United Nations to celebrate their commitment to peace and justice, contrasts with the deep sense of moral responsibility of a Sudanese refugee child whom I met on the Chad-Sudan border. So let me share that girl’s story.

This girl, Safaa Khatir, was orphaned like so many others by the Sudanese civil war that began last year between the Rapid Support Forces and another odious military group, the Sudanese Armed Forces. The Rapid Support Forces burned down her village, including her home, she said, and killed the men and boys.