Cataclysmic Human Destruction is Accelerating in Zamzam
Update from Team Zamzam, March 24, 2025
Famine conditions continue to prevail despite widespread international understanding of the acute shortages of food; even the trading markets that continue to operate are increasingly without nearly sufficient staples.
There is also a desperate water shortage as the camp struggles to accommodate an ever-greater influx of displaced persons.
There are virtually no medicines or medical services available. All roads into and Zamzam have been blocked by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which continue their genocidal predations in the villages and areas around Zamzam, El Fasher, and areas to the south and southeast. The road west to Tawila is now too dangerous to travel in either direction.
There has been a precipitous, perhaps catastrophic drop in the fuel supply for water-carrying trucks and for the larger mechanized water pumps. This is the primary reason water is now the number one priority for camp residents, according to a survey by Team Zamzam. Many other machines and devices depend on fuel, including, for example, mobile phones. These are used constantly by the Team and they depend upon being recharged. This is done by means of the generator we’ve purchased so that they might be able to communicate with one another and with Gaffar. The information and photographs in this update all require mobile phone capabilities.
Team Zamzam—and all of Zamzam—are increasingly alone with their suffering and death. And still the world allows this to continue.
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(Eric) For the second time in 22 years, full-on genocidal destruction has come clearly into view in Darfur; and the epicenter for this destruction—and the famine that is the primary weapon—is Zamzam. Famine was officially declared by the UN last August, but had been conspicuously in the making for over two years. The overwhelmingly Arab militia known as the Rapid Support Forces ((RSF) have made clear their determination to rid Darfur of its non-Arab, primarily farming population, as was the case early in the first genocide. The RSF represent a grim continuation of ambitions embodied in a 2004 memo emanating from Misteriya (North Darfur), headquarters of infamous Janjaweed militia leader Musa Hilal:
The ultimate objective in Darfur is spelled out in an August 2004 directive from [Janjaweed paramount leader Musa] Hilal’s headquarters: “change the demography” of Darfur and “empty it of African tribes.” Confirming the control of [Khartoum’s] Military Intelligence over the Darfur file, the directive is addressed to no fewer than three intelligence services—the Intelligence and Security Department, Military Intelligence and National Security, and the ultra-secret “Constructive Security,” or Amn al Ijabi. (Julie Flint and Alex de Waal, Darfur: A Short History of a Long War, Zed Books, 2005)
Much is now different in Darfur from the site of the 2003 uprising by non-Arab (African) militias. There were no IDP camps of significance when genocidal violence by the Janjaweed and the Omar al-Bashir’s Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) began that year; rather, the targets were thousands of villages, populated by non-Arab tribal groups that were overwhelmingly sedentary farmers. This number of IDP camps changed in shocking fashion over the next years: the last meaningful UN estimate of the number of displaced persons—displaced by brutal, unconstrained, and immensely destructive violence—was 2.7 million (Darfur Humanitarian Profile No. 34, January 1, 2009). The UN and other researchers would go on to chronicle the displacement of many more hundreds of thousands of people in subsequent years. They became the populace of almost 100 IDP camps throughout Darfur, as well as refugee camps in eastern Chad.
These displaced persons—a great many of them now having lived in Zamzam for years—were and are now the means for “changing Darfur’s demography”—this and the other part of the great “emptying” of African tribes, comprising the deaths of over half a million civilians through the direct and indirect consequences of genocidal violence. The heirs to this barbarism of the Janjaweed are the RSF.
Created in 2013 by al-Bashir—and led by Hamdan Dagalo (“Hemedti”), who is now continuing the campaign of destruction, rape, murder that began that year—the RSF is directly responsible for the death and suffering in an increasingly isolated Zamzam today. (The best account we have of Hemedti and the RSF in these years after its creation is provided by Human Rights Watch, “’Men with No Mercy’: Rapid Support Forces Attacks on Civilians in Darfur, Sudan” (2025), a report researched by Jonathan Loeb that is truly remarkable in what it told to an uninterested world).
What we must not do is pretend that the deaths in Zamzam are in any way accidental or “merely” collateral damage. The RSF’s months-long siege of El Fasher (capital of North Darfur State), the indiscriminate shelling of Zamzam, and the creation of a stifling insecurity throughout Darfur have all been deliberate parts of RSF military strategy. The many years of Janajweed assaulting and destroying African farms, raping women and girls (many younger than ten years of age), the murdering and displacement of farmers: all this is being extended, if by different means, with the RSF assault on Zamzam and other parts of Darfur.
This assault comes with the most callous, substantial, and conspicuous backing of expedient external actors; by far the most prominent is the United Arab Emirates. And yet despite the overwhelming evidence of this backing, from a host of researchers (including those of the UN), no country will call out the Emirates and their ruthless and corrupt strongman, Mohamed bin Zayed, to account. And so the genocide continues.
Heroically, the women of Team Zamzam, using the financial resources we provide to them, continue their extraordinarily committed humanitarian efforts, now focused on providing communal kitchens and meals that altogether have fed many, many tens of thousands of hungry people over the past three years. (For an archive of the past five years of work by Team Zamzam, going back to summer 2020, see: www.sudanreeves.org). The task is overwhelmingly large, since the population of Zamzam now exceeds 500,000. (See Appendix for a discussion of this figure.)
An overview of this month’s work by the Team is linked here. Some of the photographs sent to me and Gaffar reveal just how great the toll on camp residents has been, especially children. I have included a number of these photographs in the report from the coordinating counselor, and several above. All annotations are mine; all photographs have been taken by members of Team Zamzam.
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But we are not powerless! And Team Zamzam can do more, even in such dire circumstances. With help, the Team’s women can purchase food, even now; they can provide psychosocial counseling; and they can offer examples of commitment and courage that will bolster camp morale, which has been so badly shaken by recent RSF assaults.
It is now possible to make a tax-deductible contribution to our project, using a portal on the website of a 501/c/3 organization operating in Sudan. Operation Broken Silence, working primarily on health and education issues in the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan, has created a special site for tax-deductible contributions to our project, and we hope this makes contributing to the health and well-being of the people of Zamzam easier for donors.
Those wishing to assist in funding the work of Team Zamzam may also send a check directly to Eric (Eric Reeves, 31 Franklin St., Northampton, MA 01060).
OR
Purchase one of his woodturnings: https://www.ericreeves-woodturner.com/collections/all
All proceeds from all woodturning sales go directly to sustaining our work in Zamzam
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