Sudan. The Other Caliphate Builder.

We have quickly discovered the truth about ISIS. But, as I mentioned here, ISIS is not alone in caliphate-building, nor are they the first Islamist group to revive the agenda and methods of the war-time Mohammed.  The Islamic Republic of Sudan has followed for decades “the prophetic model” now used by ISIS. It has committed genocidal jihad against its own people in what is now the nation of South Sudan, Darfur, Nuba Mountains, and Blue Nile State. (Future blog posts will discuss Sudan’s agenda in the East (Beja Land) and Nubia, as well.)

As we commit to pray for the minority groups that ISIS is persecuting and slaughtering, and to pray against the spread and effectiveness of ISIS in building a caliphate, we should pray for the Christians and other “marginalized people groups” in Sudan (basically, the indigenous African people groups, treated with contempt and racism by the elites who rule the country). Pray against the evil works of the Sudan government both in country, and in working with other terrorists and jihadists around the world. And pray that this genocidal regime attempting to eradicate the marginalized people groups as well as establish a worldwide caliphate would be brought down and replaced with a government founded in justice and righteousness.

The building of a caliphate, a global Sharia-based hegemony, requires the elimination of all the unwanted elements — infidels and other unworthies. We have the ability to watch this in gruesome, graphic, live action social media by ISIS. But the National Islamic Front regime in Sudan is much further below the radar for most people. Below you will find two recent examples of what that government is doing to its own people in Darfur and Nuba Mountains.

MASS RAPE IN DARFUR

In October 2014 a horrific incident of mass rape took place in Tabit, a village in North Darfur. Soldiers of the Sudanese Army raped at least 221 women and girls in the space of 36 hours.

Sudan activists George Clooney, John Prendergast, and Akshaya Kumar’s New York Times opinion piece of February 25, 2015 tells of how difficult it was for the truth about this egregious attack to see the light of day because of the suppression and intimidation by the Sudanese government. Finally, four months after the mass rape took place, Human Rights Watch released a report on the incident after collecting over 130 witness and survivor testimonies.

The op ed explains, “The sexual violence has no military objective; rather, it is a tactic of social control, ethnic domination and demographic change.” As with everything it has done for the past two decades, the Sudanese government acts with impunity, and its forces victimize the entire community. “Racial subordination is also an underlying message, as non-Arab groups are singled out for abuse,” Clooney, Prendergast, and Kumar reveal.

Although the world community that acted powerfully to try “Save Darfur” seems to have forgotten that beleaguered region, the Sudan regime in Khartoum has not forgotten it. Its long-term agenda of demographic change in Darfur, by perpetrating genocide against the indigenous Darfuris and settling outsiders from the Arab world in the region, continues on. But in addition, the NYT op ed reveals that major gold reserves have been discovered in North Darfur. “Gold has become the new oil for Sudan,” says the op ed. Gold sales earned Sudan $1.17 billion last year — with much of the gold coming from Darfur, as well as from Beja Land in eastern Sudan, another region in which the demographic modification is taking place. “The government has attempted to consolidate its control over the country’s gold mines in part by violent ethnic cleansing,” the NYT piece continues.

The end of March 2015 will mark the 10th anniversary of the case of Darfur’s genocide being taken to the International Criminal Court. Still the genocide continues, and the Khartoum regime ramped up its efforts to finish off the people of Darfur in the beginning of 2015.

BOMBS FALLING IN THE NUBA MOUNTAINS

Meanwhile, the Khartoum regime has also ramped up its efforts to finish off the people of the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile State, as well. Here, as well, the Sudan government acts with impunity. The weak response of the U.S. government and the world community to its genocidal actions (and the total lack of response to its terrorist connections!) have emboldened it into (rightly?) believing that no one cares enough to stop them.

The brave journalists of Nuba Reports, providing news from the front lines of Khartoum’s war on the people of the Nuba Mountains, reports on the bombings that continually have been taking place there since June 2011. According to the latest count on their website, 3740 bombs have been dropped on civilians in the Nuba Mountains since April 2012, which is when they began reporting. Nuba Reports requests that concerned citizens “tweet every bombing” that they document with #sudanbombs, in order to “make this conflict news.” It truly is breathtaking that ongoing bombardment, starvation, and once thriving farm communities are now forced to live in caves, or to flee to refugee camps in South Sudan, Kenya, or elsewhere. But the alternative is death.

Nuba Reports tells of some of the most recent atrocities committed by Sudan’s Air Force:

• On January 7, Albanin Butrus died from shrapnel that ripped through his body after a fighter jet launched seven rockets on his village Abu Layla in South Kordofan. He was seven years old. . . Albanin was one of several children who have been killed recently in a new barrage of bombings by the Sudan Air-Force fighter jets and Antanov bombers.
• On February 3, a bomb hit a foxhole in Um Dorian County where nine children were sleeping. A sixteen year-old girl was killed immediately. The explosion lit a nearby house on fire which fell on the group of children. Two were killed . The others, disoriented and severely burned were pulled out of the fire by their parents. They are now being treated at the only hospital in the region. The same hospital that was bombed in June.

Morningstar News reports that on February 6, Sudan’s bombing of another civilian area killed a Christian woman, Naheed Saeed Komi, 25, who was nine months pregnant. Komi, a member of the Sudanese Church of Christ, is survived by her husband and three year old son. Another girl from the same church, Nour Kalowas, was also killed in that bombing.

In addition, on January 20 of this year, the Sudan Air Force targeted and dropped a cluster of 13 bombs on the only functioning hospital in the Nuba Mountains, run by Doctors Without Borders, in Frandala. Two bombs landed inside the hospital compound and the others landed just outside the fence. Thankfully, no one was killed, and among the 150 patients and staff that were present, only one patient and one staff member were injured. The same hospital was bombed in June 2014.

Here at IRD just this week we received the tragic report from the Nuba Mountains. Our friend and colleague, a priest in the Diocese of Kadugli and Nuba Mountains of the Episcopal Church of South Sudan and Sudan, sent us word that his cousin had just lost five of his children when a Khartoum war plane bombed their village of Sharf-Jamus, Acheron. The man and his remaining child were also seriously injured. He added that another family in the same neighborhood lost 2 children.

Nuba Reports journalist Yassin Hassan writes that this new ramping up by the Sudanese government is “the largest offensive since the new stage of Sudan’s civil war started in 2011.” Sudan President Omar al Bashir’s goal is to “destroy the rebels,” meaning the Sudan People’s Liberation Army – North, the forces that fight to protect the people. Through the usual moral equivalence, many of the world’s leaders and others think that “both sides” need to “stop fighting.” If the SPLA-N stopped fighting, the forces of Khartoum would wipe out the men, women, and children of the Nuba Mountains.

The Sudan government’s efforts to dominate the Nuba Mountains through genocide of the people there are also part of the same agenda to build a caliphate. Unlike ISIS they have not declared a caliphate loudly and boldly, or selected a caliph, like the Islamic States’s Abubakr al Baghdadi. They would call theirs a Mahdi, anyway. But they proceed in stealth (if you can call openly raping, bombing, starving, and killing “stealth”). To put in another way, their actions are not in stealth, but their intentions remain unknown by many. Most of those who do care about the Sudanese people and the mass atrocities being committed against them think of it only in humanitarian terms – not apocalyptic ones. And that is just fine with the caliphate builders in Sudan.