The Masalit of Ardamata: a second genocide finished what 2003 started

Twenty years after the first Darfur genocide, the same militias returned to the same towns. The 2023 campaign did in months what 2003 had left unfinished.

Twenty years after the first Darfur genocide, the same militias returned to the same towns and emptied them of the same people. The 2023 campaign did in months what the 2003 one had left unfinished.

The U.S. State Department's January 7, 2025 finding that the Rapid Support Forces had committed genocide in Sudan was, by the time it landed, an anticlimax.[1] The killings had already been documented by Human Rights Watch and the U.N. Panel of Experts; the village destruction had been mapped by Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab; the displacement had been tallied by UNHCR registration teams at the Adré crossing in eastern Chad. The American determination caught up with what the Masalit themselves had said on the record since the summer of 2023.

What the determination did not contain was the simplest number: how many Masalit are left.

Pre-2003 estimates put the Masalit at roughly 700,000 to 1 million people in West Darfur and adjoining areas of Chad, their historical seat the old Sultanate of Dar Masalit absorbed into Sudan in 1922.[2] The Darfur genocide of 2003-2005, carried out by Janjaweed militias under the patronage of Omar al-Bashir's government, killed tens of thousands of non-Arab Darfuris and displaced much of the surviving Masalit population to Chad and to camps in southern Darfur.[3] The community that remained around El Geneina, the Masalit's historical capital, numbered in the low hundreds of thousands.

That community was the one the Rapid Support Forces targeted between April and November 2023. The RSF is the direct institutional descendant of the Janjaweed militias that conducted the 2003 killings: the same Arab tribal cadres, the same technical fleet, in many cases the same commanders. The atrocity that put al-Bashir under International Criminal Court indictment was, in 2023, repeated by the same actors against the same population, in the same towns.

The difference was speed.

Seven months, end to end

The 2023 phase escalated in late April, days after the RSF-SAF war broke out in Khartoum, as RSF-aligned militias and Arab tribal allies began systematically attacking the Masalit neighbourhoods of El Geneina. The killing peaked in mid-June. On June 14, the governor of West Darfur, Khamis Abdullah Abkar, a Masalit and leader of the Sudanese Alliance armed group, was abducted and killed by the RSF hours after he gave a television interview accusing the force and allied militias of killing civilians.[4] Human Rights Watch's reconstruction, *"The Massalit Will Not Come Home,"* documents waves of killing across the April-to-November period, with Arab Coalition militias burning the markets, executing Masalit men on sight, and driving the surviving population in convoys toward the Chadian border, where fighters separated the men from the women and children at checkpoints.[4]

The mass killing on and around June 14-15 left bodies in the streets in numbers the Sudanese Red Crescent counted in the thousands; survivors and aid groups described the flight to Adré running a gauntlet of RSF checkpoints. The pattern repeated through the summer at the Wadi Kaja crossing, at Misterei, at Murnei. The U.N. Panel of Experts later estimated that between 10,000 and 15,000 people were killed in El Geneina in 2023.[4][5][6]

The Ardamata massacre in early November was the second wave. Ardamata is a quarter of El Geneina that had absorbed much of the population displaced by the earlier killings. In early November, RSF and allied militias attacked the Sudanese Armed Forces base in Ardamata, overran it, and turned on the civilian quarter around it. Human Rights Watch documented at least 1,000 civilians killed, with survivor and aid-group counts running higher.[6][7][8]

By the close of November 2023, El Geneina, a city of several hundred thousand before the war, had been largely emptied of its non-Arab population. The Masalit who had not been killed were either at Adré in Chad or scattered across the smaller border crossings further south.

The Adré ledger

The clearest surviving record of the displaced population is held by UNHCR in eastern Chad. Since April 2023, the agency has registered more than 900,000 Sudanese refugees who fled into Chad, the great majority of them from West Darfur, with the largest single concentration at Adré.[9] Aid agencies report that the overwhelming majority of those arriving through Adré are women and children, and that the population is drawn predominantly from El Geneina and the surrounding non-Arab Darfuri communities, of which the Masalit are the largest.[9][10]

Inside Sudan, the Masalit who remain are far harder to count. The IOM Displacement Tracking Matrix records large internal-displacement populations from West Darfur scattered across SAF-held areas and the Jebel Marra hill country.[11] The Sudan Conflict Observatory at the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, mapping village burnings from commercial satellite imagery, has documented extensive destruction across the West Darfur Masalit zone since April 2023.[12] Taken together, the records describe a population that has been overwhelmingly displaced from its own territory rather than counted out of existence.

The figure the State Department determination did not produce, and the registration data cannot precisely supply, is a clean survivor count. What the data does establish is that the Masalit have lost very nearly all of their territorial presence in West Darfur in roughly eighteen months, and that the surviving community now lives mostly across the border in Chad.

What "genocide" did and did not do

The U.S. State Department's January 2025 determination relied on the 1948 Genocide Convention's threshold: acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.[1] The conduct element rested on the documentary record assembled by Human Rights Watch and U.N. investigators, including survivor testimony and the RSF's own video footage of executions of Masalit men accompanied by ethnic slurs.[1][4] Human Rights Watch concluded that RSF and allied forces committed ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity in El Geneina.[4][13]

The determination's practical consequence has been narrow. Treasury sanctioned Hemedti the same week; the United Kingdom and the European Union added designations of their own.[1] The flow of UAE-linked weapons to the RSF, the Chadian airfield logistics, and the gold-export trade that finances the operation have continued. No senior suspect has been arrested. The International Criminal Court continues to investigate Darfur but has issued no new warrants against the current perpetrators. The refugee population in Chad continues to grow.[9]

What the determination describes, in legal language, is demographic erasure most of the way to completion. El Geneina, which held a Masalit majority for generations, no longer does. The Sultanate of Dar Masalit's historical territory is largely emptied of the people who gave it its name, and the largest concentration of Masalit now lives across the border in Chad.

The 2003 Darfur genocide was understood at the time as an atrocity the international community had interrupted, leaving the Masalit territorially intact. The 2023 atrocity was carried out by the descendants of the same perpetrators, against the same population, on the same ground, and it removed what the first round had left. Whatever survives of the Masalit as a coherent community now does so in a refugee economy on Chadian soil, under a Chadian government whose own relationship with the perpetrators is unsettled.

The Masalit are not gone. But they are no longer, in any territorial sense, a people of West Darfur. The next generation is being born in Chad.

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