The short answer

Darfur is the conflict that breaks the usual Sudan story. The north–south wars had a clean religious axis: an Islamist Arab state against a Christian and animist African south. In Darfur, everyone was Muslim, and many of the victims were more devout than their killers. The dividing line was race, not faith. But the state doing the killing was an Islamist state, using an apparatus that Islamism had built — and a large part of the rebellion was made of Islamists who had been thrown out of that project. So: Islamism was the machinery and the milieu; Arab supremacism was the motive.

What happened

The setup (1970s–1990s)

Darfur was an independent sultanate until the Anglo-Egyptian conquest, and it entered independent Sudan poor, remote, and politically peripheral. Three pressures converged:

• Ecological. The Sahelian droughts of the 1970s and 1980s pushed Arab camel-herding nomads south into the farmlands of the settled non-Arab groups — the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa. Mechanized farming displaced subsistence cultivators at the same time. Land and water disputes that customary institutions had once absorbed became armed ones.
• Regional. Chad’s civil war spilled across the border, and Gaddafi used Darfur as a rear base. His Islamic Legion — a pan-Arab expeditionary force — and the Libyan-sponsored Arab Gathering (Tajammu al-Arabi) seeded the region with an explicit Arab-supremacist project aimed at clearing the Sahel of African farmers and herders. Alex de Waal traces the arrival of “virulent Arab supremacism” in Darfur to returnees from the Islamic Legion.
• Political. Khartoum consistently backed the Arab side in local disputes and armed Arab militias rather than adjudicating. The first Darfur war (1987–89) pitted Arab militias against the Fur’s Federal Army of Darfur; the 1989 disarmament agreement was never enforced. A second round hit the Masalit in 1995–99. In 1994 Bashir and Turabi split Darfur into three provinces to fracture Fur political weight — the same move Nimeiry had used on the south in 1983.

The Black Book (2000)

A group calling itself the Seekers of Truth and Justice published The Black Book: Imbalance of Power and Wealth in the Sudan, distributed after Friday prayers at mosques across the country. It documented that a small cluster of riverine northern tribes — roughly 5% of the population — held about 70% of senior government posts. The regime’s attempt to buy up copies made it famous. Its authors became the founders of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM).

The war (2003–)

In February 2003, the Sudan Liberation Army/Movement (SLA/M) and JEM attacked government garrisons and overran armories, humiliating the Sudanese army in a string of engagements. Khartoum, with its regular forces already stretched by the SPLA war and unreliable in Darfur, answered by arming and unleashing the Janjaweed — the militia successor to the Arab Gathering and Islamic Legion networks, under figures such as Sheikh Musa Hilal.

What followed was not conventional counter-insurgency but the systematic destruction of the civilian base of the non-Arab groups: villages burned, wells poisoned, mass killing, mass rape as a weapon, and the deliberate emptying of the land, with air support from the Sudanese air force coordinating with militia ground assaults. Loyal tribes were rewarded with the land of rebelling ones — which gave the militias a direct material stake in clearing it.

Scale

• ~200,000 dead in 2003–05 (UN estimate), revised upward to ~300,000 by UN humanitarian chief John Holmes in April 2008 as a “reasonable extrapolation.”
• 2–2.7 million displaced, most of them still inside Darfur.
• A 2007 GAO report found the competing death estimates varied enormously in method and reliability — treat any single figure as contested. The direction and order of magnitude are not.

The genocide question

This is the part most worth getting right, because the popular version is wrong in both directions.

• Powell’s determination rested on the Atrocities Documentation Team’s interviews with more than 1,100 refugees in Chad — an unusually strong evidentiary base. It was the first time a US administration applied the word to an ongoing conflict. He then told the Senate it triggered no new obligation and would not change US policy, and invoked Article VIII of the Genocide Convention to hand the question to the UN.
• The Cassese Commission, created by UNSC Resolution 1564, could not establish dolus specialis — the specific intent to destroy a group as such — at the level of state policy, so it declined the label. It explicitly warned this “should not be taken in any way as detracting from the gravity of the crimes,” left open that individual officials might be found genocidal by a competent court, and recommended ICC referral. The Council referred the situation in Resolution 1593 (31 March 2005); the US abstained rather than vetoing.
• The ICC eventually went the other way. The Appeals Chamber ruled in March 2010 that the Pre-Trial Chamber had demanded too high a standard of proof — genocide need only be one reasonable conclusion from the evidence, not the only one — and the genocide counts went in.

Why this is a good test case for the definition

Darfur is the cleanest available illustration of the gap between the legal and ordinary-language senses of genocide. Nobody serious disputed the killing, the scale, the ethnic targeting, or state responsibility. The entire disagreement was over intent — whether the object was to destroy the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa as such, or to crush a rebellion by destroying the population that sustained it, with the destruction as means rather than end. The Commission said the second; the ICC eventually said a court could reasonably find the first. Both were looking at the same facts. Useful against anyone who treats the label as self-applying. See Genocide Debate Prep.

Was Islamism involved?

Yes — but not in the way the north–south wars would lead you to expect. Three arguments each way, then the synthesis.

Yes

1. The perpetrator was an Islamist state, and Islamism built the weapon. The NIF took power in 1989 to build an Islamic state, and its “civilizational project” constructed a parallel security architecture outside the regular army — above all the Popular Defence Forces, the militia system Bashir himself had commanded before the coup. Darfur’s counter-insurgency was executed with that apparatus. The Janjaweed were not an aberration of the Islamist state; they were its standard instrument, reused.
2. Islamism had already licensed killing Muslims. The regime’s 1992 campaign against the Nuba — Muslims among them — was prosecuted with a religious authorization declaring jihad against a population the state coded as insurgent. That precedent mattered: it established that being Muslim would not protect you if you were on the wrong side of the state’s ethnic map.
3. A large part of the rebellion was itself Islamist. When Bashir purged Hassan al-Turabi in 1999, Turabi’s followers formed the Popular Congress Party — and many of the educated Darfuris who founded JEM in 2003 came out of that milieu. Khalil Ibrahim, JEM’s leader until his death in 2011, had been an NIF cadre, a state minister in Darfur, and had served the regime in the southern war before concluding it had no intention of sharing power with the peripheries. Khartoum repeatedly accused Turabi’s PCP of directing and financing JEM. No conclusive proof of command was ever produced, and JEM denied it — but the personnel overlap is not in dispute. Darfur was, in part, an Islamist civil war.

No

1. There was no religious cleavage to exploit. The Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa are Sunni Muslim, and Darfur is among the more devoutly Islamic regions of Sudan — it was Mahdist heartland, and Darfurian soldiers and Ansar militias backed the Islamist coup attempts of 1975–76. There were no churches to close, no missionaries to expel, no Sharia to impose that wasn’t already welcome. Arabization without Islamization, because Islamization was already done.
2. The operative ideology was Arab supremacism. The Arab Gathering was described by Gérard Prunier as a militantly racist and pan-Arabist organization insisting on the “Arab” character of the province. Its Qoreish doctrine traces local Arab lineages back to the Prophet’s tribe — but that is a claim about descent, using Islamic material to license an ethnic hierarchy, not a theological program. Its sponsor, Gaddafi, was an Arab nationalist first.
3. The specialists reject the religious framing. De Waal’s Counter-Insurgency on the Cheap (LRB, August 2004) reads Darfur as a pattern Khartoum had run repeatedly in the south — famine and scorched earth by proxy militia — driven by resource competition and ethnic polarization, not theology. He calls it “genocide by force of habit.”

Synthesis

Islamism explains who was doing it and with what; Arab supremacism explains who was killed and why. The Islamist regime supplied the militia system, the impunity, the security cabal operating outside the budget, and the habit of subcontracting atrocity. What it did not supply was the target selection — that came from a racial ideology imported from Libya and grafted onto local land conflicts.

The sharper point is that Darfur is a case of Islamism failing on its own terms. The Islamist project’s core promise to the peripheries was that shared faith would dissolve ethnic hierarchy and deliver inclusion — the argument that had justified forcing Islam on the south in the first place. Darfur’s Muslims took the promise seriously, joined the movement, and discovered that riverine Arab elites regarded African Muslims as spiritually insincere and politically disposable. The Black Book is that discovery written down. When religious identity turned out not to buy a share of power, the grievance reverted to the ethnic axis underneath — and the state answered it as a race war.

Cross-connection worth pursuing

This is the same structural move that shows up wherever a universalist religious ideology is fused to an ethnic core: the universalism is real enough to recruit with, and never real enough to redistribute power. Compare the treatment of non-Arab Muslims here with the way ethnic and national identity gets smuggled into supposedly creedal projects elsewhere — worth a pass against the Christian-nationalism material.

Aftermath and the line to today

• 2006: Darfur Peace Agreement (Abuja) — signed by only one SLA faction, and it fractured the rebellion further rather than ending it.
• 2007: UNAMID, the joint UN–African Union force, authorized; chronically obstructed and under-resourced.
• 2009–10: ICC warrants for Bashir; he remained in power and travelled freely among sympathetic states for another decade.
• 2019: Bashir overthrown by popular protest and a military coup.
• 2013–present: The Janjaweed networks were formalized as the Rapid Support Forces under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (“Hemedti”), a former Janjaweed commander — the state converting its deniable militia into a standing paramilitary. That force is one of the two belligerents in the current war, and in 2023–24 it resumed ethnic cleansing against the Masalit in West Darfur, prompting the January 2025 US genocide determination. See Sudan Civil War 2023-.

The through-line

Every Sudanese government since 1955 has answered peripheral rebellion by arming a local proxy against the rebels’ civilian base, and each proxy has outlived the government that raised it. Anya-Nya II, the Murahaleen, the Popular Defence Forces, the Janjaweed, the RSF. Darfur is not an episode; it is the method.

Key figures

Sources

• Powell: ‘Genocide’ in Sudan — NPR, 9 Sept 2004
• Inside Colin Powell’s Decision to Declare Genocide in Darfur — Pulitzer Center
• Powell’s testimony on Darfur, State Department email conversation — National Security Archive
• Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, 25 Jan 2005 (full text, PDF)
• UN receives report of inquiry into possible genocide in Darfur — UN News
• UN Commission’s Report on Violations of International Humanitarian Law in Darfur — ASIL Insights
• Sudan: ICC Warrant for Al-Bashir on Genocide — Human Rights Watch, 13 Jul 2010
• The Prosecutor v. Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir — ICC case information sheet
• Alex de Waal, “Counter-Insurgency on the Cheap: The Road to Darfur” — LRB, 5 Aug 2004
• A Close-Up Look at Darfur’s Paramount Rebel Leader: Dr. Khalil Ibrahim — Jamestown Foundation
• Profile: Khalil Ibrahim — Al Jazeera
• Hassan al-Turabi’s Islamist Legacy in Sudan — International Crisis Group
• Sudan-Chad: Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) — ReliefWeb
• Darfur Crisis: Death Estimates Demonstrate Severity of Crisis — US GAO, GAO-07-24
• Genocide Determination in Sudan and Imposing Accountability Measures — US State Dept, 7 Jan 2025
• Sudan: The Crisis in Darfur and Status of the North-South Peace Agreement — Congressional Research Service

Reading to close the gaps

These are the standard scholarly treatments, none of which I’ve read for this note — flagged so I don’t cite them as if I had:

• Alex de Waal & Julie Flint, Darfur: A New History of a Long War
• Gérard Prunier, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide
• Douglas Johnson, The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars (the source the video itself leans on)
• Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors — the main dissenting account, which attacks the genocide framing and the Save Darfur movement directly. Worth reading as the steelman against everything above.