Popular organizations and movements across Africa and beyond have condemned the ongoing massacre of the Sudanese people by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), calling for an immediate end to the violence. Urging support for the Sudanese people’s struggle for peace, justice, and democratic self-determination.
Across Africa and the world, progressive and popular organizations are raising their voices in solidarity with the people of Sudan, as they face one of the most brutal and protracted conflicts in the world today. From Ghana to South Africa, from international networks to grassroots movements, the message is unified in a call to end the massacres, open humanitarian corridors, and uphold the Sudanese people’s struggle for justice, peace, and sovereignty.
Amid mounting international condemnation for its war crimes, especially over the last several weeks, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have reportedly agreed to a three-month pause in the fighting. However, analysts and activists argue that the “humanitarian ceasefire” is far from a solution to the two-and-a-half-year war.
The Socialist Movement of Ghana (SMG) condemned the “genocidal conflict between factions of the militarized elite” that has terrorized the people of Sudan since 2023. In their statement, the movement expressed solidarity with the Sudanese people and their popular organizations, including the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP), lauding their courage and political clarity in the face of devastation.
The SMG statement described the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the RSF as a tragic consequence of elite rivalries and foreign interference. It denounced the “murky transnational corporate and resource-grabbing agenda of the United States, Western powers, and some Arab and East African countries” fueling the conflict.
“The people of Sudan clearly reject both warring factions and any national ‘solution’ based on military force or elite interests,” SMG declared, reaffirming that Sudan’s revolution, born out of the people’s 2018 uprising, continues to embody the demand for democracy, justice, and full sovereignty over national resources.
The International Peoples’ Assembly (IPA) and Pan Africanism Today (PAT) also issued a joint statement condemning the “brutal massacres currently unfolding in Sudan,” particularly in El-Fasher, Bara, Darfur, and Kordofan, describing the atrocities as genocide. They called for immediate international mobilization, demanding a ceasefire, protection of civilians, and independent investigations into war crimes.
“The Sudanese people face a destructive war machine, defending their dignity, communities, and right to live,” the statement read. It called upon trade unions, women’s movements, youth, and social movements worldwide to stand with Sudan through coordinated actions, educational events, and artistic expressions of solidarity.
Joining this call, South Africa’s Abahlali baseMjondolo Movement, representing shack dwellers and grassroots activists, issued a solidarity statement denouncing the ongoing massacres in El-Fasher and Darfur. The movement condemned the RSF’s atrocities; executions, mass killings, and the starvation of entire communities, financed by the United Arab Emirates and sustained by European complicity in migration control.
“The uprising that began in December 2018 was a democratic revolt of workers, women, students and the urban poor,” Abahlali’s statement reminded. “That uprising gave rise to new grass-roots forms of democracy through the resistance committees, which continue to provide food, medicine, and mutual aid amid war.”
Sudan’s struggle is our struggle. As the Socialist Movement of Ghana declared:
“Let us stand for unity, sovereignty, and development. Sudan’s struggle is Africa’s struggle.”
This article by republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.
On February 16, 1959, Cuba established the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, the executive body of their defense force, and its first Army General, Raúl Castro Ruz. Photo: Miguel Díaz-Canel/X
A recent webinar by Pan Africanism Today and the International Peoples’ Assembly looked at global struggles, from Africa to Latin America, showing how Cuba’s enduring resistance offers vital lessons in organization, unity, and internationalism for today’s movements fighting oppression and war.
The world is in an era marked by relentless wars and overlapping crises, from the devastating civil war in Sudan and violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo to the unfolding genocide in Palestine. The demand to end all wars has never carried greater urgency. And in the midst of all these visible battlegrounds persists a more enduring and insidious conflict; the hybrid war and economic blockade waged against the Cuban people and their revolution.
This was the central focus of a recent global webinar convened under the banner of Pan-African and internationalist solidarity, bringing together progressive voices to draw lessons from Cuba’s anti-imperialist struggle. The session, held on October 15, was facilitated by Mbali Gwenda from Pan Africanism Today, who situated the discussion within a broader historical and moral framework, invoking the revolutionary spirits of Thomas Sankara, martyred on the same date in 1987, and Assata Shakur who recently passed, and whose life consistently symbolized uncompromising resistance to oppression.
“We are dealing with the question of the hybrid war and blockade against the Cuban Revolution and her people,” Gwenda said. “A revolution that has been a source of inspiration for all oppressed peoples throughout the world till this day.”
The keynote address was delivered by Manolo De Los Santos, executive director of The People’s Forum and a researcher at the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, who framed Cuba’s defiance not as a miracle, but as the outcome of a centuries-long process of people’s struggle, organization, and consciousness.
The long arc of revolution
De Los Santos began by looking at Cuba’s revolution more than an event confined to the years 1953–1959, when Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and others led the guerrilla war against the Batista dictatorship. Revolutions, he reminded the audience, are not events but processes, collective journeys of resistance that unfold across generations.
Cuba’s revolution, he argued, has roots reaching back to centuries of anti-colonial and anti-slavery resistance, when the island was still a colony of the Spanish Empire. Unlike many independence movements in Latin America, Cuban revolutionaries understood that genuine freedom required addressing three interlinked questions:
Could Cuba truly be independent if it remained a slaveholding society?
Could it be free if it continued under the exploitative system of capitalism?
Could it claim sovereignty while dominated by imperial powers, first Spain and later the United States?
These questions shaped the consciousness of generations of Cuban patriots, culminating in the 1959 triumph of the socialist revolution. But as he explained, the revolution’s endurance has rested on three essential pillars: organization, unity, and internationalism.
Organization: the bedrock of resistance
Organization, De Los Santos emphasized, has been the Cuban people’s greatest weapon against imperial aggression. From the early independence wars to the 26th of July Movement led by Fidel Castro, Cubans have understood that only a disciplined, organized people can confront an empire with infinite resources.
This organizational spirit persisted after 1959, with the creation of mass democratic structures that unite workers, women, peasants, students, and youth. The Federation of Cuban Women, for example, mobilizes millions in defense of gender equality and revolutionary ideals, while student and peasant organizations remain vital spaces for political education and collective problem-solving.
Even under today’s extreme shortages such as the lack of fuel to power garbage collection, Cuban communities respond not with despair but with collective initiative, a reflection of their revolutionary organization and social consciousness.
Unity, he continued, has been the second indispensable lesson from Cuba. Every time the people were divided, the empire gained the upper hand; every time they stood together, they won. This unity has transcended class, race, and regional divisions, dismantling the legacies of slavery and racism that imperialism imposed.
The Cuban Revolution’s unity was forged not just through ideology but through practice, through collective participation in building a new society. It remains, as Manolo put it, “the most important defense the Cuban people have.”
Internationalism is the soul of the revolution
If organization is the body and unity the shield, then internationalism is the soul of the Cuban Revolution.
Quoting Fidel Castro, the New York-based researcher reminded participants that “a people who are not willing to fight for the freedom of others will never be able to fully fight for their own freedom.”
This principle drove Cuba to send tens of thousands of its sons and daughters to fight alongside liberation movements in Angola, Namibia, and South Africa, contributing directly to the defeat of apartheid. As he noted, “Cuba doesn’t need gold or minerals from Africa, it knows that its freedom is tied to the freedom of the peoples of the African continent.”
Even today, with over 24,000 Cuban doctors working abroad, many across Africa, Cuba continues this legacy of solidarity. The US, in its campaign of distortion, now accuses Cuba of “human trafficking” for this very act of humanitarianism.
The United States’ war against Cuba has been fought through unconventional means. It is a hybrid war, a combination of economic blockade, financial strangulation, media disinformation, and covert sabotage.
For more than 65 years, the blockade has inflicted immense human and economic damage. In 2024 alone, it cost Cuba USD 7.5 billion, money that could have been used to buy food, medicine, or oil for its 11 million citizens.
The war is also fought in the terrain of ideas. US-funded media campaigns spread false narratives about repression and poverty in Cuba while erasing the country’s achievements in health, education, and solidarity.
Socialism and survival
When asked on how Cuba has managed to survive more than six decades of blockade, Manolo’s answer was clear: because Cuba made a socialist revolution.
Socialism, he said, allowed Cuba to create a system where the needs of the people come before profit. In capitalist societies, when crises hit, the rich survive and the poor starve. In Cuba, food, healthcare, and education are distributed equitably, even in times of scarcity. This social organization transforms a siege economy into a community of resilience.
This difference, he explained, is what makes Cuba unique among nations facing US aggression. It’s also what inspires global movements seeking alternatives to neoliberalism and imperial domination.
Cuba, Sankara, and the spirit of resistance
The session also honored Thomas Sankara linking a symbolic bridge between the African and Latin American revolutionary traditions. Both embodied a commitment to self-reliance, dignity, and international solidarity.
Sankara’s vision of a self-determined Africa resonated deeply with the Cuban experience. His assassination on October 15, 1987 marked a turning point in African politics, yet his ideas continue to inspire movements across the continent, just as Cuba continues to stand as living proof that another world is possible.
In closing, Manolo issued a clear call; the Cuban people will overcome the blockade, but they cannot and should not do it alone. Their survival depends on the solidarity of all who believe in justice, sovereignty, and equality.
Cuba’s endurance is not simply a Cuban story; it is a lesson for all peoples resisting imperial domination. As the world faces renewed militarization and economic warfare, the spirit of organization, unity, and internationalism must also be crucial as ever.
“When they stand with the Palestinians, when they stand with the Congolese, when they stand with the peoples of the African continent,” Manolo concluded, “they are breaking the blockade too.”
This article by republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.
Destruction in El Fasher, Sudan. Photo: Resistance Committees
After running out of animal fodder, people are now consuming cow skin as a last resort against starvation in North Darfur state’s besieged capital, cut off from all food supply by a 57-km wall the paramilitary has built around the city.
Walled in by war-torn Sudan’s paramilitary, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), over two hundred thousand civilians in North Darfur state’s besieged capital El Fasher “have nothing left but resistance and a collective death,” warned the city’s Resistance Committees (RC)*.
Traders report having completely run out of food supplies as famine closes in on the malnourished population, cut off from food aid since the RSF laid siege on the city in April 2024 to oust the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) from its last foothold in the Darfur region.
There were “only some secret points to enter and exit the city”, through which small quantities of food supplies were being smuggled through the siege, reportedly with the collaboration of some RSF troops, said Saleh Osman, President of the Darfur Bar Association.
However, severe shortages and hoarding meant that grains were sold at prices multiple times higher than before the war started in April 2023. Unable to afford, most people were surviving on small portions of porridge made from kora ambaz – a type of animal fodder left behind after extracting oil from peanuts.
Unsafe for long-term human consumption, it had nevertheless become a staple of last resort for the survival of El Fasher’s residents. Now, however, the “ambaz is gone too”, the RC said in a statement on October 14.
Total siege
The earthen wall that the RSF started building around the city this May to totalize its siege is reportedly complete, 57 km long, leaving little or no opening for food or any other essentials to be smuggled in.
“El Fasher is now effectively under siege from all directions,” Stéphane Dujarric, Spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General, said in a briefing on Wednesday, October 15. With the “earthen barriers around the city… preventing movement of both people and supplies”, the city’s markets, which have been repeatedly bombed by the RSF, “are largely empty”.
The little amount of grain left in the city is priced beyond reach. “A kilo of rice costs 450,000 Sudanese pounds” – over USD 748 – said Adam Rojal, spokesperson of the General Coordination of Darfur Displaced People and Refugees. Early this month, even the cost of a 50-kilo sack of ambaz had reached 2 million Sudanese pounds, over USD 3,300.
The last of the community kitchens, which Dujarric described as the “last line of support”, closed down on October 11. “People are now eating cow skin to survive”, the RC said, posting a video of a resident roasting the animal hide over an open fire. “This is not just hunger. It’s a slow, deliberate death under the RSF siege.”
Famine – which first broke out in August 2024 in displaced people’s camps on the outskirts of El Fasher – is fast closing in on the city where about 260,000 residents, including 130,000 children, remain trapped, awaiting death by starvation, if they are not killed by the RSF first.
The smell of death now fills the streets
Composed of the Janjaweed militias organized by the SAF to commit mass atrocities during the civil war in Darfur in the 2000s, the RSF has ethnically cleansed several areas in the other four states of Darfur that it has taken over.
In over 250 attacks on El Fasher, the RSF has already killed hundreds in shelling. “The shells pour down like rain, not distinguishing between a sleeping child or a mother pleading to the heavens to protect her children,” the RC said after the intense bombardment of the city on October 3.
“The smell of death now fills the streets, blood washes over the pavements, homes are destroyed on top of their inhabitants, markets have been reduced to ashes, and bodies are being pulled from beneath the rubble – without names, without faces, only numbers in a long record of massacres.” Hundreds of bodies remain in the rubble of residential neighborhoods struck by drones.
Later on the night of October 7, RSF shelled the hospital multiple times, killing at least 13 and wounding sixteen others, including medics. The shelling destroyed several wards in one of the last remaining hospitals in El Fasher.
“No aid planes, no humanitarian bridge, no genuine international action”
“After over 500 days of unremitting siege by the RSF and incessant fighting, El Fasher is on the precipice of an even greater catastrophe if urgent measures are not taken to loosen the armed vice upon the city and to protect civilians,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned earlier this month.
“The international community – led by the United Nations – continues to speak in the language of proposals without action. The UN proposal to deliver humanitarian aid by air to Al-Fasher has been awaited far too long, at a time when waiting is no longer an option – because people are dying of hunger now,” the RC complained.
“No aid planes, no humanitarian bridge, no genuine international action, no ground movement to lift the siege,” it lamented. “We cry for help and no one answers… We see our city being erased and we die resisting, because we have nothing left but resistance and a collective death in the silence of the world.”
*Organized in localities across Sudan’s cities, the Resistance Committees comprise a decentralized network of youth activists. It spearheaded the mass pro-democracy protests against the military junta before its components – the SAF and the RSF – turned on each other, hurling Sudan into a civil war in April 2023. Since the war, the Committees have been at the forefront of coordinating and organizing relief, rescue and defense of stranded civilians.
Over 400,000 people were forced to flee to El Fasher from the Zamzam refugee camp due to RSF ground operations. Photo: Doctors Without Borders
The specter of ethnic cleansing looms over hundreds of thousands trapped without food, water, or medicines in the North Darfur state’s besieged capital, El Fasher.
Nearly half a million people were forced to flee from North Darfur state’s capital, El Fasher, and the nearby Zamzam camp for displaced people in just the two months of April and May, the UN Secretary-General’s spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, said in a press briefing on Monday, July 7.
North Darfur is the only one of the five states where the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have retained a foothold in the war-torn Sudan’s vast western region of Darfur, overrun by its rival, the paramilitary Rapid Support Force (RSF), within six months of the war’s start in April 2023.
Moving against this last holdout, the RSF laid siege in May 2024 on El Fasher, where the SAF has a base, and the Zamzam camp on its outskirts, where some of the local self-defense units allied with the SAF are positioned.
“People are not only caught in indiscriminate heavy fighting between” the two warring forces, but are also being “actively targeted by the RSF and its allies, notably on the basis of their ethnicity,” Michel Olivier Lacharité, MSF head of emergencies, said on July 3.
SAF created the RSF in Darfur
The RSF was coalesced in 2013 from the militias the SAF had spawned from Arabic-speaking nomadic communities to perpetrate mass atrocities on the regional-language-speaking groups of sedentary farmers that supported the rebel groups during the Darfur civil war in the 2000s.
The partnership between SAF and the RSF lasted a decade, during which they seized power together to form a military junta in 2019, when mass pro-democracy protests forced the ouster of Omar al-Bashir after a 30-year-long dictatorship.
The duo deployed its troops to jointly repress the militant protests that continued until April 15, 2023, when the intensifying power struggle within the junta between the two forces crossed the Rubicon, mobilizing their forces against each other and hurling the country into a civil war.
IDPs under attack
Now continuing into its third year, the civil war has claimed an estimated 150,000 lives and displaced nearly 13 million people, unleashing in this poor North African country the world’s worst displacement crisis.
Over three million of the displaced have fled to other countries as refugees. An estimated 8.6 million have remained as Internally Displaced People (IDPs). Darfur, which already had almost 3.1 million IDPs from the regional civil war in the 2000s, was among the worst-affected regions by this new war.
The RSF maneuvered quickly to take control over this region, starting with West Darfur, where it committed ethnically targeted massacres in June 2023 against the Masalit community, most of whom were displaced in the Darfur civil war. Ethnic cleansing of this community from West Darfur was nearly complete by November that year.
By then, the RSF had taken over most of the region, with North Darfur as the SAF’s only holdout. Members of the state’s Zaghawa community, which had until then remained neutral, volunteered in large numbers to form self-defense units that aligned themselves with the SAF.
“In light of the ethnically motivated mass atrocities committed on the Masalit in West Darfur… MSF fears such a scenario will be repeated in El Fasher – notably because witnesses report that RSF soldiers spoke of plans to ‘clean El Fasher’ of its non-Arab, and especially Zaghawa, community,” MSF said in a report released on July 3.
Titled “Besieged, attacked, starved: Mass atrocities in El Fasher“, the report added: “Aside from the direct violence exerted on civilians, residents from El Fasher and surrounding areas [also] have been prevented from meeting their basic needs.”
Famine
The RSF’s siege since last May has cut off the city and its surrounding localities from supplies. Its markets have been repeatedly bombed by both sides. At the Zamzam camp located seventeen kilometers south of El Fasher, a famine was declared in August 2024.
Among the largest IDP camps in the country, it was already sheltering about 350,000 displaced people from the Darfur civil war. With new displacements from this intra-junta civil war, IDPs nearly doubled in Zamzam. Its meagre resources in the form of aid were already stretched when its supply was cut off by the RSF’s siege in May 2024.
“When fighting erupted in Zamzam in December 2024 and then intensified at the end of January and in February 2025, the camp was hosting … up to 700,000,” MSF’s report added.
Most of them had to flee again, for the second, even third time, after the RSF’s large-scale ground offensive this April, displacing over 400,000 in three weeks, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
“A large proportion of the population fled to El Fasher, where they remained trapped, out of reach of humanitarian aid and exposed to attacks and further mass violence,” the report warns.
No escape for the Zaghawa community
Over 68,000 others have fled across the western border to Chad, according to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). No one identified as Zaghawa was let through the RSF checkpoints, multiple survivors told the MSF. “They would only let mothers with small children under the age of five through,” said one of the refugees interviewed in Chad.
“Other children and adult men didn’t go through. Males over fifteen can hardly cross the border [into Chad]. They take them, they push them aside, and then we only hear a noise, gunshots … Fifty families came along with me. Not even one boy of 15 years old or above.. [is] among us” in Chad.
“The number of people killed and injured” in the RSF’s offensive on Zamzam is “unknown”, the report said, adding “with no functional hospital within the camp, most of the wounded had no access to life-saving medical assistance.”
“Access to healthcare has been rendered near impossible, as most healthcare infrastructure has been partially or completely damaged.” MSF’s own medical facilities have been attacked over a dozen times since last May.
The violence in Sudan has pushed North Darfur’s Zamzam camp, home to over 500,000 people, into famine. Photo: WHO
“The world has completely forgotten the crisis in Sudan” where “a slow death” has become the plight of millions, decried Adam Rojal, spokesperson of the General Coordination of Darfur Displaced People and Refugees.
As the fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) intensifies in North Darfur state and the Kordofan region, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk warned on Friday, June 20 of a “further aggravation in an already brutal and deadly conflict.”
The war, which began in April 2023, has created the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, displacing nearly 13 million, leaving Sudan with the highest number of displaced people globally. 30 million, almost two-thirds of the population, need humanitarian aid, including food assistance.
The worst affected are children, amounting to half of the hungry and displaced population, the UN said last week, decrying a severe fund shortage, leaving it unable to assist over 80% of the children in need.
Children under the age of five are the largest group of victims of the measles outbreak, amounting to over 60% of the 2,200 suspected cases since the start of this year. Another 230 children have been killed and 7,300 suspected to have been infected by cholera, which broke out last July, killing over 2,000 and suspectedly infecting over 80,000 people.
The number of cholera cases sharply spiked earlier this year in Sudan’s capital region of Khartoum where over 34,000 displaced people returned mainly since March after the SAF retook control from the RSF.
Damaged in the fighting, most of the homes to which they returned lacked water or sanitation. In May, the RSF launched a series of drone strikes on water purification units and power plants, further curtailing water supply, and forcing residents to resort to unsafe sources, which caused over a nine-fold rise in cholera cases in the second half of that month.
Last week, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) raised the alarm that the cholera wave had now reached the western semi-arid region of Darfur for the first time since the war began.
In a press statement on Sunday, June 22, the General Coordination of Darfur Displaced People and Refugees warned that diseases may spread rapidly as monsoon season has begun in Darfur, with rains lashing over the displaced sheltering only under plastic sheets with no sanitation facilities.
Particularly vulnerable to the deadly diseases are the children and the pregnant and breast-feeding women who are already suffering from malnutrition, its spokesperson Adam Rojal told Peoples Dispatch, “The world has completely forgotten the crisis in Sudan” where “a slow death” has become the plight of millions, he decried.
The Darfur region consists of five states, of which North Darfur remains the only state where the SAF has retained a foothold in its capital El Fasher. The RSF, which controls the rest of the region, has laid a siege on the city for over a year now, cutting off its supply of food and other essentials, and frequently bombarding the famine-stricken displaced peoples camp on its outskirts. Activists have warned that El Fasher itself is on the verge of famine.
Now in its third year, the war that has caused a humanitarian catastrophe on such a scale “is far from over”, a UN fact-finding mission warned last week.
The RSF – which the SAF claims to have killed 28,613 and wounded 43,575 since the start of the war – is also making advances in the Kordofan region in the center and southern region of Sudan. Civilians in South Kordofan’s city of El-Dibeibat – a crucial crossroad linking the state with North Kordofan and West Darfur – have been caught up in the crossfire for over two years.
Fleeing this city, thousands sought refuge in North Kordofan’s capital El-Obeid, under SAF’s control. However, the RSF has surrounded El-Obeid, “and may attack it in the coming days, as announced by the RSF commander,” the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner said on June 20.
