The man who helped scores to flee violence in Darfur

Every night, for weeks at a time last year, Saad al-Mukhtar put a small group of people in the back of his Toyota Land Cruiser and drove them under the cover of darkness from his home in the Sudanese city of Geneina across the border and into Chad.

- Zeinab Mohammed Salih GENEINA

The operation was an extraordinary act of bravery and selflessness: Mukhtar is an Arab, and the people he was smuggling to safety were members of the darker-skinned Masalit community who were being targeted in a vicious wave of ethnic violence perpetrated by Arab militias.

“I helped everybody who knocked on my door,” Mukhtar said. “I didn’t know the majority of them.” The name is a pseudonym – he said if his real name was used, his life and those of his relatives would be in danger.

Over the course of last year, after the outbreak of war in Sudan in April, tens of thousands of Masalit people fled from Geneina and the wider West Darfur state into Chad. The war began in the capital, Khartoum, when Arab paramilitary group the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) attacked positions held by the regular army, but soon spread around the country. In the western Darfur region, an RSF stronghold, ethnic violence against the Masalit people flared up again 20 years after the start of a genocide perpetrated by Janjaweed militias, which later morphed into the RSF.