Sudan tragedy

from AlJezeerah:

Sudan has vast oil, gold and agricultural resources. Who controls them? Sudan’s conflict continues to reshape the nation of 50 million amid widespread displacement and a fight for resources.

Sudan’s civil war, now in its third year, has pitted the army against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in a devastating struggle for power. The conflict has unleashed the world’s largest displacement crisis, with more than 9.5 million people forced from their homes across Sudan’s 18 states and millions facing starvation.

follow the money. It is about gold (one reason the Wagner group mercenaries from Russia were there) and petroleum. 

Oil exports are Sudan’s primary source of revenue. Production expanded between 2001 and 2010, from 200,000 barrels per day to nearly 500,000bpd. In 2011, it collapsed when South Sudan seceded, taking 75 percent of Sudan’s oil reserves with it.

Sudan is one of Africa’s leading gold producers, with deposits across the northeast, centre and the south. Most of the deposits in eastern Sudan are controlled by the Sudanese army, while the central and southwestern goldfields are largely under RSF control.

StrateyPage has an essay from March about the war there, giving background on the war, but it is a bit out of date since the atrocities have gotten worse.

Military history of South African influence

 I just found this site, which discusses battles and military history.

And today it is about Angola and South African wars.

I haven't watched it yet, but post it here for information on the background/history of that area.

Muslim terrorists? Yes, and don't forget the communists

 I am no longer an expert on Africa: It has been years since I worked there, and my ability to keep up with the news there is limited since I was a busy doctor and now I am retired but live in the Philippines where until recent years had a slow internet.

But anyway, the ignorance of the US press/pundits on Africa is astonishing (which is why I tend to read about Africa on Al Jazeerah).

And example: The massacres of a Christian hospital in the Congo by Jihadis.

I thought this was about the massacres in a hospital in the Sudan but that was last week 

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqx31ezjr04o

and that war by rebel vs government helped by Russian mercenaries and is about who gets the gold, not about religion, but never mind.

This story is getting some mention in the US press because Trumpieby is pressuring the Nigerian government to stop the massacre of Chrisians in Nigeria. Which is partly jihadi,and partly tribal and although most of the dead are Christian, both groups will kill the moderate Muslims too, because they are farmers of the wrong tribe and don't follow radical forms of Islam.

Well, anyway, the article I am citing is here, about a massacre at a Catholic hospital in the Congo.

and I cam across it on Instapundit, a libertarian blog which links to that article thus: 

ETHNIC CLEANSING IS TO BE IGNORED AND TOLERATED WHEN MUSLIMS DO IT: Congo Jihadis Massacre Catholic Hospital Patients as Fighting Rages On. 

 well, anyway, the discussion is full of intelligent republican types who know diddly squat about Africa. 

My ignorance is also huge but I did try to correct some of the comments and here are the posts: it is not just jihadis. The Congo has had so many massacres by various insurgencies that there is a Wikipedia page. Most of these before recent years were by various revolutionary groups, usually funded by the communists.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_the_Democratic_Republic_of_the_Congo 

 and let's not forget the millions killed by that Christian King Leopold at the turn of the 20th century.

 https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/library-research-services/collections/diversity-inclusion-belonging/king-leopolds 

later a commenter said: It is the heart of darkness. Sometimes it's religion sometimes it's tribal. The Hutu vs Tutsi "Rwandan genocide" 30 years ago killed 800,000. Many with machetes.

  to which I replied:

and ironically those countries had many Christians doing the killing. 

Indeed, the Muslims often refused to kill their neighbors when ordered to do so, claiming it was against their religion. As a result many survivors converted to Islam.

 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2003/11/9/rwandans-embrace-islam-in-wake-of-genocide 

 and then there were comments if the US should intervene, which won't happen because as one poster pointed out it would result in the US being blamed for the killings. 

]And so I posted   that the US is not the only one with military capacities there

  But you know, China is there and they will send in their Wolf Warriors to rescue their people if the Jihadis attack the cobalt and rare earth metal mines. 

 

https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia-pacific/china-africa/china-expands-its-peace-and-security-footprint-africa 

 ,,,,,and the world is ignoring the Russian mercenaries who are fueling the murderous war in the Sudan.

 https://africanarguments.org/2025/11/gold-and-mercenaries-the-price-of-the-massacre-in-sudan.....

that is where I left it: leaving out the French military, and the American training groups, not to mention the history of Cuban mercenaries, South African intervention, and the African union peacekeepers and UN peacekeepers who sometimes are successful but often are corrupt. Sigh.

ISIS, terrorism and tribal wars in Africa

 A long essay on StrategyPage.

November 1, 2025: Over 200,000 deaths are attributed to Islamic terrorist groups operating in sub-Saharan Africa in the past ten years. Separately, escalating violence in the Sahel and Somalia has caused fatalities linked to militant Islamist violence in Africa to increase by 60 percent in the last twelve years. Aggressive Islamist groups in Africa continue to be the most active agents of instability across five theaters on the continent. At least 20,000 fatalities linked to these groups over the past year sustain a record level of lethality observed since 2023 and represent a 60-percent increase from the 2020–2022 period. Battle-related fatalities have increased in every theater over the past year. All five African theaters, including Mozambique and North Africa, remain highly dynamic with militant insurgents mounting offensive operations in each, especially in the Sahel and Somalia.

when I was in AFrica, the massacres were from communist groups, and the Rwanda massacres were tribal not religious, and the massacres in Zimbabwe were partly tribal and partly poolitica.... but now it is Islamic groups. What it comes down to is that when things are bad, young men will join such groups to make utopia, and also to have fun by waving guns around and bossing people around to steal and rape.

this is not an African problem: see the Red Guard in China for example.

Trump threatening Nigeria is not going to lead to the US sending in soldiers (No Yank would let him) but economic pressure and offers to help with technology if the government does their job.

Nigerian genocide

Father Leo is a FilAm (American of Philippine parents) who became most famous for his cooking show, and now has a vlog to discuss religious issues in the news.

so Trump is threatening to intervene and so the usual suspects are ignoring what is going on or reframing the story

No it is not anti Christian, but tribal, ignoring that the Fulani tribal attacks became rabid because of Islamicist ideas (i.e. instead of merely moving their cattle onto farmer's fields to eat, which has been going on for centuries, they are killing these farmers. 

No it is not anti Christian because Muslims are being killed. But the Muslims are being killed by the radicalized Islamicist groups are not the radicalized Muslims but the normal Muslim believers who are not in favor of killing their neighbors. 

And my favorite: Hey don't condemn the killing because hey it interferes with us making peace.

from Genocide Watch:

(Makurdi, Nigeria) – In the early hours of Friday, June 13, 2025, more than 200 Christian villagers were slaughtered by heavily armed Fulani jihadists in Yelwata, a farming community in Guma County, Benue State. This mass killing is part of a disturbing wave of targeted violence that has swept across central Nigeria in recent weeks...

 

more details at link.

More atrocities in the Sudan

 via DW site (German news):

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said it was, "deeply alarmed and profoundly shocked" by reports of "horrifying atrocities and immense suffering to which people from el-Fasher are being subjected."

Late Tuesday, Tedros called for the release of four doctors, a nurse and a pharmacist reportedly abducted from the hospital. The massacre took place as the RSF took control of the city of el-Fasher after a brutal 18-month siege marked by mass starvation and heavy bombardment.

The European Union on Wednesday condemned Sudan's paramilitary RSF after the group captured the strategic city of el-Fasher in North Darfur. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said in a statement that civilians had been targeted based on ethnicity, underscoring the "brutality" of the RSF.

,,,

Sudan: WHO 'appalled' by RSF maternity ward massacre,

.@WHO is appalled and deeply shocked by reports of the tragic killing of more than 460 patients and companions at Saudi Maternity Hospital in El Fasher, #Sudan, following recent attacks and the abduction of health workers.

Prior to this latest attack, WHO has verified 185… pic.twitter.com/CbAjtqYUAh

— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) October 29, 2025

....

to me this is personal: The communist insurgents killed a lot of my friends in the name of establishing a communist utopia in Zimbabwe. And later, the greedy soldiers did the same in Liberia, which later descended into a decade long civil war.

But no one cares.

there is an old book The Dogs of War, about how such things can happen: behind it is the search for mineral wealth. In that book, it is mainly western governments and businesses doing the dirty work of manipulating wars to put in governments that will let them get rich. Now it is more complicated as China and Russia are doing the same thing.

In the Sudan, the Wagner group were there to steal gold for Putin. That story was from 2022. But after the head of the Wagner group tried to overthrow Putin, they disbanded, but are still in the Sudan under a different name:

Bill Maher bring Nigerian debacle to the attention of the west

 The ongoing murder of Christians by Muslims in Nigeria has gotten little press in the USA.

Much of it is by Islamicists of course (including Boko Harum) and some of it is the Muslim Fulani inspired by ISIS attacking farmers, and more recently, criminals who attack to steal stuff or kidnap clergy for ransom.

but although this has been covered in the Christian press, the dirty little secret is that it has been ignored by the US MSM  

The good news: A famous comedian dared to mention it in his show, 

Yet the MSM doesn't say Bill Maher rebukes the MSM for it's lack of coverage: The headline say he "gripes" about it,

Gripes? Why not use the word lament? Gripe usually implies complaining about a petty thing that annoys you, not horror and dismay about genocide. 

But hey, he is Jewish and those he mentions are Christian and Muslim Africans.

On Friday night’s edition of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, the interview guest was Aiden Walker, content creator, internet culture researcher, and author of the Substack newsletter “How To Do Things With Memes.” The panel guests were Michael Smerconish, host of “Smerconish” on CNN and “The Michael Smerconish Program” on SiriusXM; and Rep. Nancy Mace, Republican congresswoman from South Carolina’s 1st district who also sits on the Armed Services, Veterans’ Affairs, and Oversight committees.

 

During the panel segment, Rep. Mace said the slaughter of Christians in Syria was ignored at the UN this week, and Maher interjected that the same is true for Nigeria. He diagnosed the apathy in relation to the situation in Gaza:

REP. NANCY MACE: We saw the world leaders come to New York this week, the UN summit, and we had the president of Syria, the prime minister of Syria there, and while he’s there speaking at the UN, speaking with world leaders, we gave him a visa to travel here. There were Christian villages in Syria that were being burned down.

BILL MAHER: And Nigeria.

REP. NANCY MACE: No, in Syria.

BILL MAHER: No, but both. 

REP. NANCY MACE: In Nigeria, yes.

BILL MAHER: Nigeria, I mean, the fact that this issue has not gotten on people’s radar…

REP. NANCY MACE: Right, no one’s talking about it.

BILL MAHER: It’s pretty amazing. If you don’t know what’s going on in Nigeria, your media sources suck. You are in a bubble.

And again, I’m not a Christian, but they are systematically killing the Christians in Nigeria. They’ve killed… Over 100,000 since 2009. They burned 18,000 churches. This is so much more…

These are the Islamists, Boko Haram. This is much more of a genocide attempt than what is going on in Gaza.

They are literally attempting to wipe out the Christian population of an entire country. Where are the kids protesting this?

REP. NANCY MACE: Thank you. No one will talk about it, so thank you. Absolutely. It’s Africa. No one’s talking about it. And they should be. You can’t read about it on mainstream media. It’s sad. So thank you for bringing it up.

BILL MAHER: Well, because the Jews aren’t involved. That’s why. It’s the Christians and the Muslims who cares.  

The persecution has been covered in various Christian news outlets however, and here is a dicussion on July 10 on EWTN (start at 35 minutes):

The Catholic News Agency has a summary about what is going on there published last week

According to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria (CBCN), at least 145 priests have been kidnapped, 11 have been murdered, and four remain missing since 2015. However, Intersociety claims the reality is much worse. According to its counts, at least 250 Catholic clergy have been attacked in addition to another 350 clergy from other denominations....

The phenomenon, according to the report, is due to a combination of attacks by jihadist groups and organized criminal gangs operating for profit. Priests have been victims of both violent ambushes and financial extortion. “Many were kidnapped for ransoms reaching tens of millions of nairas [Nigreian currency] or thousands of dollars. In other cases, the attackers sought to seize luxury vehicles belonging to the clerics to sell them to criminal networks,” Intersociety details in the report. ... Likewise, there have been systematic kidnappings of Christian children in eastern Nigeria who are sent to Islamic orphanages in the north for forced conversion to Islam, affecting Catholic schools and communities.

Intersociety report here in pdf

Hudson Institute report here which is about the Fulani Muslim herders killing Christian (and Muslim) farmers in nothern Nigeria.

Christianity today report.  

In Africa’s most populous nation, a deadly cycle of violence has unfolded for several years, with Christian clergy and laypeople as well as moderate Muslims falling victim to murder and kidnapping.

The Christian nonprofit Open Doors recently reported that in 2024 some 3,100 Christians were killed and more than 2,000 kidnapped in Nigeria.,,,, The violence is largely the work of two groups—the extremist Islamist militant Boko Haram and its splinter factions, and a range of militias or bandits linked to Fulani herders, Muslims who have waged a campaign of land grabs against Christian farmers in the fertile, and more Christian, “Middle Belt” of central Nigeria as the Fulanis’ grazing land has dried up over the past decades.

,,,

this recent video is from CBN about one attack

here is a report from SkyNews Australia