Ibrahim, his baby sister and their mother, Safaa Abdel Karim, were on the run in June, fleeing a weeks-long massacre in the Sudanese city of El Geneina. Arab militiamen had shot, stabbed and burned to death members of their tribe, the darker-skinned Masalit people.
Abdel Karim’s husband was among the dead. Along with dozens of women and children, she and her kids were trying to make it to safety in neighboring Chad. They almost did.
About 10 kilometers from the border, she said, Arab paramilitary forces and militiamen stopped them and ordered her to hand over Ibrahim. They looked inside his clothes to inspect his sex, then set him down and began bashing his head and body with wooden rods.
“He was crying, mama, mama,” Abdel Karim said. When she tried to rescue him, one of the men shot her below the shoulder, she said, leaving a scar from the wound. “I kept screaming to leave my son. Don’t kill my son.”
The men kept striking Ibrahim. “You zurga won’t stay in El Geneina,” the men shouted, using a racist term for darker-skinned people like the Masalit. “They said if the boy grows up, he will fight us.”
Bleeding from her wound and with her daughter in her arms, Abdel Karim said she kept trying to stop the attack on Ibrahim. But the men continued beating him until he lay dead.
Abdel Karim was one of more than 40 mothers who described to Reuters how their children, mostly boys, were killed by Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary and its allied Arab militias during an ethnically targeted killing campaign this year in and around the West Darfur capital of El Geneina.
Her son and the other children were all part of the Masalit tribe, which was a majority in El Geneina until the RSF and Arab militias forced them out. Around half a million people, mostly Masalit, have left for Chad as a result of the violence.
Thousands have died in the attacks. The dead include women and girls. Masalit women also have described enduring sexual assault at the hands of the Arab-dominated RSF and its allies, as Reuters detailed last month.
But in the killing sprees, witnesses say, Arab forces have specifically targeted males for death, from infants to adults.
--Reuters--
