In Sudan, RSF Invokes Tradition to Force Children Onto Battlefield

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In an effort to recruit new fighters the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) is invoking Faza’a, an ancient, pre-Islamic Sudanese tradition.

Faza’a allows tribes to call on their members and allies for support against attacks by other tribes or to take revenge for killings. The RSF has exploited Faza’a to recruit teenagers and children to fight on the front lines much as it did 20 years ago in Darfur when it was known as the Janjaweed.

Experts say such recruitment can have life-changing consequences for the young victims.

“There are psychological and social ramifications on child recruits,” Dr. Ikhlas Abbas Mohamed, director of the Psychological Counseling and Safety Unit at the Ministry of Education, told the news site Al-Araby Al-Jadeed. The impacts include anxiety, depression, substance abuse, social isolation, and the potential to commit serious crimes such as murder and sexual assault.

More than 18 months into the conflict, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and RSF are taking vastly different paths toward recruiting new fighters.

The SAF has used social media to bring in volunteer fighters and direct them to their nearest command or military unit to sign up. The new recruits come from all walks of life.

Mohamad Awadallah, a merchant, answered that call as a volunteer after the RSF overran his home of Sennar State.

“In Sennar, I saw death,” Awadallah told PBS NewsHour in September. “There were rapes. The RSF were killing anyone they found in front of them.”

Soon after fighting began in 2023, SAF chief Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan declared in a speech that all young and capable men should enlist in the armed forces. In early July of that year, al-Burhan said that the Army was ready to receive and equip volunteers. By September, civilians recruited by the SAF took part in a military training and parade in Wadi Hamid, in northern Sudan.

Many of the SAF’s new recruits were young men from River Nile State, a region that historically has produced many of Sudan’s military and political leaders.

New recruits from River Nile State told Al Jazeera that they were motivated to join the SAF out of concern that the RSF could attack their cities, loot their belongings and subject women to sexual violence.

“I picked up a gun to defend myself, my ethnic group and my homeland,” said Yaser, 21, from Shendi, a city in River Nile State, told Al Jazeera. “The RSF are not just at war with the Army. They are at war with civilians.”

The RSF, on the other hand, has compelled civilians to join its cause. According to Dr. Abdul Qader Abdullah, general secretary of the National Council for the Protection of Childhood, the RSF has recruited children at least 200 times since war broke out in April 2023.

One of those was the 15-year-old brother of Umm Kulthum Mohamed (a pseudonym for security concerns), who joined the RSF in June 2023. He has not been heard from since.

“Since my brother left to fight with the RSF no one has told me anything about him, and we don’t know whether he is alive or dead,” Mohamed told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.

Sudan’s deteriorating humanitarian situation makes children, especially those with no family, easy targets for RSF recruitment, Siobhán Mullally, U.N. special rapporteur on trafficking in persons, wrote in a statement.

Along with invoking ancient traditions such as Faza’a, the RSF also has repeatedly withheld food from civilians in regions it controls to coerce them to take up weapons on its behalf. The ultimatum has been labeled “enlist or die.”

A CNN investigation in March 2024 found that almost 700 men and 65 children, many of them farmers or merchants, had been forced to join the RSF in al-Gezira State alone.

In some cases, when men refused the RSF’s demand, they were executed, witnesses told CNN.

The RSF’s compelled recruitment amounts to a forced labor system, Mohamed Badawi, a lawyer with the African Center for Justice and Peace Studies, told CNN.

“People need to survive — they have no other choice, no one to complain to. If you don’t kill for them, you will be arrested,” Badawi said.