Taking Life Without Killing

The tragedy of Darfur speaks to the worst of what human beings can do to one another. To inflict torture, you must first understand pain, not just as a concept but as a visceral experience. Only by knowing its depths can someone twist and weaponize it into something deliberate, meant to destroy both body and spirit.

What the Rapid Support Forces have done in Darfur is not incidental. It is systematic. Men shot in front of their families, women raped and tortured with a deliberateness that makes the word cruelty feel insufficient, children mutilated, burned alive. Survivors and investigators have told me that RSF fighters forced family members to eat the dead while the militants watched and laughed. This cannot be expressed more softly. The RSF’s campaign is not just about control; it’s about erasure.

“Males over nine were killed, often after extreme humiliation, like being paraded on all fours like dogs,” says Tom Prichard, executive director of the NGO Sudan Sunrise, which has long advocated for the oppressed in the region. “RSF fighters told one man to cry in front of his family. Then, when he was executed, his family was told that he was a coward.”

Men are buried alive under the scorching sun, while their wives, mothers, and daughters are held down, often at gunpoint, helpless to save them as they die a slow, suffocating death.

The impact on women and children has been particularly devastating. These women are already surviving on the edge of what’s survivable, in a region that has known violence and scarcity for generations. What is being done to them now goes beyond the physical. Rape here is used as a method of erasure, aimed at harming something beyond the body. The women who live through it describe a kind of destruction that leaves no mark you can point to and no name that fully covers it.

Women are abducted, sold as enslaved people, and often left to die from the injuries inflicted upon them. RSF fighters are known to rape women with a range of blunt and sharp objects, tie them to acacia trees and violate them until they lose consciousness from blood loss and internal trauma. In some cases, RSF fighters inserted guns into women’s bodies and fired, acts performed with apparent cruelty and laughter.

Many mothers have offered themselves to the RSF fighters in place of younger, unmarried relatives. It is not difficult to understand the calculation behind that choice, but almost impossible to accept: the married woman absorbing what might not survive socially, culturally, or in any other way.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

These are the decisions being made inside this violence. They don’t make the news.

In many communities, virginity carries deep cultural significance, particularly for women. It is closely tied to perceptions of purity, honor, and family reputation. Traditional interpretations of Islamic teachings place a high value on sexual modesty, and a woman’s virginity is often viewed as essential to securing a respectable marriage—symbolizing not only personal integrity but also familial status within the broader community.

For Darfurian families, this form of sexual violence does more than traumatize individuals. It destroys the social fabric itself. Communities, relationships, and futures are fragmented beyond repair.

“Other men were forced to watch their wives being raped, and then the men were killed, to send a message that they could not protect their families,” Tom tells me. “And beautiful women were sold as slaves in the market, sometimes exchanged for cars.”

The RSF understands that to disgrace someone through rape is to destroy them, to burnish their hopes and dreams and the chance of marriage, motherhood, and normality, without removing them from the earth.

One morning, I sit with Samah on cracked plastic chairs in the makeshift clinic. At twenty-two, she carries herself with the wisdom of someone much older, wide-set eyes that have seen too much and remain soft.

Samah, from El Genenia, tends to the sick at the clinic with gentle, deliberate hands. She taught herself English by watching American movies and speaks it beautifully, though softly, forcing me to lean in.

“I cannot stand to watch my people suffer,” she says. “Girls raped, their parents killed in front of them—now dealing with pregnancy. I think about it so much. I have to do something with my hands...”

When not at the clinic, Samah keeps optimism alive by making falafel and pancakes to sell in the market. At night, she sits by candlelight, handwriting a book about the devastation that has transpired. Samah fled El Genina with her mother, seeking refuge not just for survival but to help those left behind. She witnessed the execution of an entire family.

“I saw children who did nothing wrong, and they died,” she continues. “I want to speak out. People need to know the truth.”

Samah once longed to study abroad in America, maybe even join the FBI.

“But my dreams are no longer important,” she says with a bittersweet smile. “What matters is that my people are trying to work, trying to be useful. We just want shelter and food. People are starving.”

War doesn’t just destroy the present; it kills the future. I suggest exploring scholarship opportunities or publishing her book.

“My mother needs me,” she replies, shaking her without hesitation. “I have to be here for her.”

The next day, Samah greets me with a smile and hands me a neatly folded letter in elegant cursive:

“I wanted to tell you about the students who wanted to complete their education for themselves and their families. There is a pain—your body hurts more than your mind, or your heart, or your eye that saw body parts, or your nose that still smells blood. The pain fills your throat with screams. The destroyed soul is not the same one that left you. Discolored victims.

Love, Samah.”

I find myself rabidly looking for the windows of light, for some semblance of something that is not despair and loss. I write it down when I find it. Children somewhere out of sight, laughing. Playing with punctured tires, kicking cans like soccer balls. The sound carries. As an outsider looking in, I cling to these fleeting moments, trying to stay composed in a place so far removed from my world.

It’s easy to file it away. Somewhere in the accumulation of it, the edges start to blur. You’ve been to enough camps, filed enough dispatches, heard enough versions of the same devastation that the mind starts to reach for categories instead of people. I notice myself doing it and have to stop. The women across from me had houses. Children with names. Specific plans for specific futures. The world paid attention for a moment, wrote something and moved on. These women are still sitting in this camp. That gap doesn’t close just because the coverage did.

Each day, I leave the camp covered in grime, sand, and sweat, wondering how they tolerate it day after day.

Many refugees have given up and returned to their ravaged homes in Darfur; not because it is suddenly safe, but because life in the camp is unbearable. It is a cruel choice: suffer in the open or suffer under a roof that barely shelters them. Still, the world looks away. Worse, keyboard warriors in safe spaces expect everyone to rise and fend for themselves.

How do you fight back when you’re dirty, exhausted, and starving? How do you fight back when the other side has hills of ammunition and heavy weapons, and you don’t even have a piece of bread? Will the world respond? Or will Darfur be left to fight another tragic chapter of its long history?

For Darfur’s mothers and their children, the answer is not politics or power, it’s survival. Politics is for someone else. There is no time for politics when you’re trying to stay alive. The maternal givers continue to weave, imagine, and fight: not with weapons, but with motherhood’s steadfast courage.

The mothers are still here. That is the first thing to say about Sudan. Barefoot, worn down, hauling water and holding onto whatever hasn’t been taken yet. The children are alive because of that. Not because of any intervention, not because of any policy. Because of that.

Mothering here means grieving and giving at the same time, sometimes within the same hour. It means singing when there is nothing to sing toward. To bury someone with one hand and hold someone else with the other. When there is no grave, only a name, a mother holds it anyway. She becomes the record. Her body is the only memorial that moves.

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