“We don’t want to see any Black people,”
“This war could end in two weeks if the R.S.F. entered an ammo drought
because the Emirates decided it was no longer worth it.”
This is an excellent moment to apply public pressure, for the Emirates
[incredibly] appears to be lobbying for one of its top Foreign
Ministry officials, Lana Zaki Nusseibeh, to be the next United Nations
Secretary General.
By Nicholas Kristof
Last year, human rights experts warned for many months that a brutal
militia was about to overrun a major Sudanese city, El Fasher, and
massacre inhabitants.
President Trump and other world leaders mostly shrugged. The militia
went ahead and overran El Fasher, slaughtering some 60,000 people in a
few weeks.
Now the same militia is besieging another major Sudanese city, El
Obeid, which has half a million or more people, and is also
threatening populations to the north in the Darfur region. Some inside
El Obeid are starving, yet, again, Trump and many other world leaders
seem largely indifferent.
Preventing the slaughter would not require military action. It would
not even require money. Put aside the arguments over whether
humanitarian assistance is worthwhile. (But first, let me say that I
believe the billions spent on the Iran war would have been better
allocated to $2 bed nets to save children’s lives from malaria.) It
may be that all we need to do to avert atrocities in Sudan is to speak
up.
The backdrop: Sudan is probably the world’s worst humanitarian crisis
right now. The country is caught in a civil war between the army and a
largely Arab militia, the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F., and while
both sides have behaved viciously, the R.S.F. is particularly
notorious for savagery, including for killing and raping members of
several Black African ethnic groups.
While reporting on the Chad-Sudan border in 2024, I interviewed
survivors who described the R.S.F.’s systematically killing men and
boys over the age of 10 and gang-raping many women and girls.
“We don’t want to see any Black people,” one woman quoted an R.S.F.
leader telling villagers before the militia slaughtered the men and
boys, among them her five brothers.
The R.S.F. is now massing forces around El Obeid and attacking it with
drones. Food is scarce and people are weakening. The region is
suffering an outbreak of cholera, which, if it spreads, could greatly
increase the suffering.
“Another human rights catastrophe is unfolding in Sudan,” Volker Türk,
the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, warned a few days ago. He
added that people in the region are being subjected to summary
executions and sexual violence.
“Families have to queue for long hours to get water that is often
unsafe for drinking,” the Norwegian Refugee Council reports. “Once
they manage to bring water home, they must choose whether to use it to
drink, cook or wash.”
It’s not entirely clear if the R.S.F. plans to overrun El Obeid or
whether there would be a blood bath if it did. Compared to El Fasher,
fewer people in El Obeid are members of the Black African ethnic
groups that the R.S.F. targets. It’s even possible that the siege of
El Obeid is a feint to distract from an attack elsewhere, such as on
the Darfur city of Tawila.
Still, the risks are immense, and the United Nations Security Council
issued a statement last month warning of the “imminent risk of mass
atrocities.”
Leaders are willing to speak about the violence itself. Both the Biden
and Trump administrations described the situation in Sudan as
genocide. The State Department just last month warned of “alarming
indications that mass atrocities could be imminent.”
But what American, European and United Nations officials won’t say
openly is that the power behind the R.S.F. is the United Arab
Emirates. Although the Emirates denies it, its backing of the R.S.F.
is well established. Yet the Emirates is rich and influential, so it
has become The Country That Must Not Be Named.
Tough public comments and other pressure from Washington and European
capitals might shame the Emirates enough for it to tell its murderous
friends in Sudan to back off; similar pressure led the Emirates to
pull most of its forces out from a brutal war in Yemen in 2019.
Instead, world leaders today tiptoe around the Emirates’ role.
The Emirates has particularly close financial ties to the Trump
family. Indeed, Trump’s family income surged last year partly because
an investment firm tied to the Emirates paid hefty sums for a stake in
the family’s main crypto company.
Members of Congress, led by Senator Chris Van Hollen and
Representative Sara Jacobs, have sponsored legislation that
essentially would limit sales of weaponry to the Emirates as long as
it arms the R.S.F. “This awful conflict could be ended if we had the
political will to do so — instead of starting stupid wars with Iran,”
Van Hollen said.
I share the belief that such a measure could end this catastrophe —
but it is languishing from indifference. We should have the fortitude
to speak up about human rights outrages whether the responsible party
is Russia, China, Israel, America or the Emirates; if you care about
human rights in only some places, you don’t actually care about human
rights.
Sudan isn’t getting much attention, partly because the crisis areas
are difficult to enter. I was organizing a trip to the conflict areas
last month, but my route closed at the last minute, and I had to put
the trip off. Enough information is trickling out for diplomats and
aid groups to be able to ring the alarms; it’s just that the world is
ignoring them.
“The international community must stop reacting to atrocities and
start preventing them,” noted Rabab Mohamed Ali Baldo, a Sudanese
activist originally from El Obeid.
This is an excellent moment to apply public pressure, for the Emirates
[incredibly] appears to be lobbying for one of its top Foreign
Ministry officials, Lana Zaki Nusseibeh, to be the next United Nations
Secretary General.
“This won’t end until the Emirates are pressured to stop their
advanced weapons superhighway to the R.S.F.,” said Nathaniel Raymond
of the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, which closely follows the
crisis in Sudan.
“This war could end in two weeks if the R.S.F. entered an ammo drought
because the Emirates decided it was no longer worth it.”
So, this is in part on us. Will we find the courage to speak up?
Nicholas Kristof: I may get pushback from readers who say that what
happens in Sudan is none of our business. My response would be that if
we describe something as a genocide, then it should be our business to
speak out and do what we can. Is that persuasive? What other arguments
can I marshal?
This article was published by The New York Times July 11, 2026
