Ibrahim Yusif: “I'm trying [to bring my family from Sudan to New Haven], but it's a difficult thing.” Ibrahim Yusif grew up near the city of El Geneina in Darfur in western Sudan. One of five brothers and three sisters, he lived on the farm where his family grew mangoes, guavas, lemons, tomatoes, okra, sweet potatoes, millet, corn, and beans. ​“We harvest it over there and we take it to El Geneina to sell, before the war.”Yusif is one of a growing number of Sudanese refugees who have relocated to New Haven — and are urging city residents and political leaders in their adopted home country to pay attention to, and to help stop, one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.A group of Sudanese refugees now living in New Haven and across Connecticut recently met with U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy to talk about the ongoing civil war.Among the topics were care and protection of refugees, solutions to deliver aid and rebuild the country, and a ceasefire and end to arms deliveries. The group also called for humanitarian parole for Sudanese refugees, diplomatic pressure on the UAE to halt arms sales, increasing humanitarian aid, and raising global awareness of the crisis.“We met with him to let him know our concerns about the impact of this war and what we need to influence in the Senate to bring this horrible war to an end,” said Abdelillah Douda, who came to New Haven in 2001 to pursue a master’s degree at Southern Connecticut State University. In New Haven, he teaches Arabic in local colleges and is the CEO of the Mercy Valley Relief Organization, which provides aid for those in refugee camps.“We were 12 people who wanted to give stories and our concerns from different dimensions, and to cover the entire country. We spoke about the situation of different regions of Sudan. We tried to give a holistic picture about the situation of the country, and what the needs are of each part of the country. We are sure that he will share that with his colleagues in the Senate, particularly in the foreign relations committee, and that might have very good consequences for Sudan.”The war, meanwhile, first came to Yusif’s family’s farm in 2003, when he was 13. Arab Janjaweed militias, proxies for the Sudanese government, were attacking farms and villages to drive non-Arab Africans like the Yusif family off their land. They fled in the night with the clothes on their backs and whatever money they had, walking, running, and hiding for five hours until they crossed the border into Chad.They found an open field to live in and turned it into a farm. After two years, Yusif found a job in a restaurant in a city in Chad and sent money to his family. From Chad he went to Libya where he worked as a tailor, security guard, farmer, and in a restaurant. When civil war broke out in Libya he went to Tunisia, found work on a farm, and applied for a refugee visa to the United States. In 2013, he arrived in New Haven, thanks to Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS). He worked different jobs, most recently at the Omni Hotel, until early this year when he returned to Chad for an extended visit with his family.His family, who belong to the Masalit ethnic group, is part of a diaspora that has seen hundreds of thousands of people internally displaced in Sudan, and up to a million more living as refugees in Chad. The fighting that began 20 years ago has ebbed and flowed as the international community negotiated peace agreements and the United Nations and the African Union posted a joint peacekeeping force. Since 2019 the violence in Darfur has increased and a civil war has spread throughout Sudan and risks becoming the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis, with 10 million people displaced and 2.5 million facing starvation.“It’s worse than 20 years ago,” said Douda. He’s from the Bargo ethnic group, whose homeland straddles the Chad-Sudan border. In Chad, he worked on rural development projects and as a high school and college linguistics teacher.“Because 20 years ago most of the war was in the rural areas, and the general infrastructure was intact. With absence of the central government in Khartoum, the absence of any kind of administration in the country, the absence of any army in the country, civilians are at the mercy of the Janjaweed and other forces driving people from their houses and killing people.”And unlike 20 years ago, wars in Ukraine and Gaza and other geopolitical considerations have diverted the world’s attention. Unlike 20 years ago, the ethnic cleansing in Darfur has not become a cause célèbre.“People had lawn signs, there were celebrities, there were wristbands, there was mass campus mobilization, there was divestment. This time, nobody really cares,” said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Yale Humanitarian Research Laboratory at the Yale School of Public Health, which tracks humanitarian crises. According to the United Nations, 10 million people have been displaced in Sudan.“The Sudanese civil war right now is the largest displacement crisis in the world, period. It is also, if not already, about to be the largest hunger crisis in the world.”Farmers And Nomads Vie For Pastures, WaterAbdelillah Douda: Arabic teacher and relief org CEO. For hundreds of years Darfur was home to both non-Arab Africans who tilled the soil and Arab nomads who grazed camels and cows. When conflicts arose over pastures and water, said Douda, ​“That kind of thing used to be settled by local leaders. It was very harmonious at that time.” Now, he said, ​“This is a conflict between the Black people of Darfur, who are the original owners of the land, and the Arabs, Janjaweed, who are nomads, coming a couple of hundred years ago. Most of the Black people believe that the Janjaweed and other militias are planning to take their land.”By the 1990s, drought in Chad was sending Arab nomads across the border into Darfur in search of greener fields. Sudan’s president, Omar Al Bashir, who was seeking to ​“Islamicize” the country, exploited growing tensions to launch an ethnic cleansing of Darfur. Arab militias, who came to be known as the Janjaweed, terrorized the countryside, driving members of the Masalit, Zaghawa, Fur, and other African ethnic groups from their lands. Those groups in turn formed their own militias for self-defense. In 2005 the International Criminal Court charged Al Bashir and four others with war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.By 2006, according to Human Rights Watch, the death toll reached the hundreds of thousands, with hundreds of thousands more internally displaced or refugees in Chad. When, in 2007, the UN Security Council approved the UN-African Union peacekeeping mission to protect civilians, violence subsided but did not end. In 2013, Al Bashir created the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and populated it with members of the Janjaweed militias. Now, with official government status, their attacks against non-Arab populations in Darfur continued. By 2019, however, a coup forced Al Bashir from power after months of protests over rising prices. Although he’d counted on the RSF for support, they turned against him to support the people protesting. ​“Al Bashir invited the Janjaweed to come to support him,” said Douda, ​“but leaders of the Janjaweed had their own ambitions of power.”A transitional military council assumed power, followed by a civilian government that lasted only two years until military officers again staged a coup. (Al Bashir’s whereabouts remain a mystery. He was last known to be in prison in Sudan in 2023 on corruption charges.)Large-scale attacks by the RSF in Darfur resumed in 2019, and in 2020 the Sudanese government asked the UN-African Union peacekeeping force to leave. In 2023, a power struggle between the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces became a countrywide civil war, with both the SAF and the RSF getting help from outside powers. The RSF has the support of the United Arab Emirates and Chad is the conduit for their supplies of arms.Meanwhile, Egypt, Iran, Russia, and others support the Sudanese Armed Forces. According to Douda, their goals are access to such raw materials as gold and uranium, and in the case of the UAE, to shipping ports on the Red Sea.A Proxy War For Regional Power“You have to put this in the geopolitical context,” said Raymond of the Yale Humanitarian Research Laboratory. ​“The problem is that the resolution of the Sudanese Civil War is not more important, on the international stage, than diplomatic negotiations and considerations about other issues, including Gaza, including Iran. Like all the other regional conflicts — Yemen, Syria — this conflict is a proxy for broader regional power position.”Raymond has been a war crimes investigator for 25 years, working with the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, the World Health Organization, the United Nations International Organization for Migration, and the U.S. Department of State.The humanitarian research laboratory, which moved to Yale from Harvard two and a half years ago, has been tracking the ongoing genocide in Darfur for years via satellite imagery that yields evidence of arson fires, explosions, and massacres. The lab also uses the imagery to confirm fatality figures by looking for new graves in cemeteries. Last year, the Yale team tracked in real time an ongoing massacre in El Geneina, one of Darfur’s largest cities. The UN estimates that 15,000 people were killed over several weeks as the RSF targeted members of the Masalit tribe.“We watched them from space between April and June,” Raymond said. ​“So many people died that there were piles of bodies that we could see from space. We could also identify the sites where the civilians had survived, since it was a massacre that occurred over weeks with people sheltering in place. As people were waiting to be killed, they would gather the bodies together and we could see where they were moving them.”Among those who escaped were 20 members of the family of Abdelfattah Osman, who arrived in New Haven a few months before the massacre. He grew up in Mesetery, a village outside El Geneina where his mother was a teacher and his father a nurse. When he was 15 his family, which included two brothers and five sisters, moved to El Geneina. Osman studied veterinary sciences at Nyala University in Darfur, then worked as a veterinarian in Kuwait for three years. He arrived in New Haven in 2022 and is learning English at Gateway Community College and working in a warehouse.His family survived the massacre in El Geneina by moving from house to house to avoid the RSF. ​“They went to a different house in another area that was a bit further from fighting and the violence. They thought they’d stay there for a month or two, but then the fighting reached there as well.” Osman sent his family $1,500 to pay a fixer to get the family across the border into Chad. ​“It was very difficult because the RSF were killing people who were trying to leave, so they had to pay a lot of money for safe passage into Chad. On the trail to Chad they just kept seeing dead bodies.” They’re now in the Metche refugee camp. ​“They don’t really have any of the basic necessities for life. There’s no good health care, no good hospitals, no clean water.”A Deepening CrisisAbdelfattah Osman on his family living in a refugee camp: "They don't really have any of the basic necessities for life." Raymond fears the situation in Darfur is worsening, with about a million people near the city of El Fasher at risk of violence and famine. It’s the last stronghold of the Sudanese government in Darfur and is under siege from the RSF. ​“If El Fasher were to fall, then RSF would control a third of Sudan, equal to the size of Texas, and they would be able to fight from there for years,” Raymond said. ​“El Fasher is culturally significant, politically significant, strategically significant, logistically significant. It is the final battle for Darfur. Who controls El Fasher controls Darfur.”Asked if he anticipates another massacre, his answer is a resounding yes. ​“They’re already doing in the eastern part of El Fasher what they will do to all of El Fasher, which is they’re burning it. They burned as many as 50 communities through arson attacks since March 31. Inside the Zaghawa section of El Fasher we can watch them burn individual houses from space.”The city has a population of about 2 million that increased by 800,000 as people fled the countryside. Those people are now at risk, he said, and the 2023 El Geneina massacre is a precursor of what he expects to see in El Fasher. ​“Men were executed in front of the women. The women were raped, and in some cases, they piled the living children together, then shot them in front of their parents. Then they would toss babies into burning homes. That’s what happened, so we don’t need to be hypothetical about what’s going to happen.”The International Criminal Court is investigating war crimes and crimes against humanity in Sudan and in June the United Nations Security Council called for an end to the siege of El Fasher. The continued siege, the UN resolution said, would be ​“catastrophic.” Legislation introduced in the U.S. Congress calls for a suspension of arms sales to the U.A.E. pending a determination that the Emirates are no longer providing support to the RSF.Help From New Haven and ConnecticutOn Aug. 27, Douda, of the Mercy Valley Relief Organization, was one of about a dozen people from Sudan now living in Connecticut who met with U.S. Sen. Murphy to discuss the crisis there. Murphy, who sits on Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, had visited the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya earlier in the summer. ​“U.S. humanitarian aid helps support a quarter million refugees at that camp — mostly women and children fleeing violence, and in many cases, the civil war in Sudan,” Murphy said. About that meeting, Murphy added , ​“Everything I do in the Senate comes back to Connecticut, so upon my return, I met with a group of Sudanese-Americans. Several of them had fled the atrocities in Darfur and built a life here in Connecticut. It was an important conversation that underscored why the U.S. must play an active role in helping stabilize the region and increasing humanitarian aid to ease migration.”The New Haven area refugees and immigrants are working to help their families and hope for solutions to the crisis. Osman said his family hopes to return to El Geneina someday. He believes that peace will come if support for the RSF from outside Sudan ends. ​“If there was a way to stop the flow of arms and the flow of weapons into the hands of these nomadic tribes that comprise the Janjaweed, then maybe there would be a way for peace, because there would be no way for them to get their hands on weapons to slaughter innocent people.”Yusif is hoping to bring his family to join him in New Haven. ​“I’m trying, but it’s a difficult thing.” In the meantime he sends them money.Douda, of the Mercy Valley Relief Organization, has made several trips to refugee camps in Chad both to provide aid and to bear witness. ​“I see every terrible thing,” he said. ​“I see people, children, elders, living in the open. They don’t have shelters to protect them from wind, no shelters to protect them from rain, no shelters to protect them from heat, no shelters to protect them from cold, no food.”Mercy Valley has established a small clinic in one of the camps, with two exam rooms and a pharmacy. It has also launched a breakfast program that feeds between 600 and 700 children every morning.“Really, it’s very gloomy, and very dark,” Douda said. ​“There is deep frustration among the refugees. They feel that they are forgotten by the international community. But there is a glimpse that one day the situation might change. For the time being, the only thing that they need is good faith for everybody to put down his gun and negotiate a solution to the problem.” Several steps are necessary, he said. First, the situation in Darfur should be considered separately from the civil war in Sudan. The next step is to address the humanitarian crisis. ​“We have more than a million persons in the open in Chad, lacking every basic thing for human life.” International intervention is also needed to bring security to the region. His final point is a call for justice. “We feed people, we give them basic needs of human life, we provide them with security, stability, people go back to their houses, then we come with justice. There are some criminals that should be punished. This cannot happen without good faith from all parties, because this is a country now in disaster.”