For Immediate Release (Westlake Village, CA) — Tensions have flared between South Sudan and its neighbor Sudan following the killings of South Sudanese Christians in Wad Madani, a city in eastern Sudan. Christian Solidarity International’s (CSI) project manager for South Sudan and Sudan reported the South Sudanese “were targeted for being black and Christian.”

“This atrocity crime came hard on the heels of the U.S. State Department’s claim that the rival Rapid Support Forces have committed genocide against indigenous Muslim Black Africans in Darfur in western Sudan,” commented CSI International President John Eibner, an expert on the region. “Politically and socially marginalized Black Africans appear to be targeted for atrocities by both rival Islamist fighting forces.”

In Sudan itself, a civil war has been raging since April 2023, when fighting broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the rebel Rapid Support Forces (RSF). On January 11, 2025, the SAF recaptured the strategic city of Wad Madani which the RSF had seized in December 2023. The recapture of Wad Madani is seen as a major breakthrough for the Sudanese army. The city, situated southeast of the capital Khartoum, had been a place of refuge for thousands of people fleeing the fighting – among them South Sudanese citizens – before becoming a center of conflict itself.

Videos began circulating on social media apparently showing government troops capturing and slaughtering South Sudanese civilians in Wad Madani. News reports spoke of between 13 and 29 people executed and beheaded.

Enraged by the massacre, some South Sudanese carried out retaliatory attacks on Sudanese traders and refugees in Juba, the South Sudanese capital, and other urban centers. Protests on the evening of January 16 spilled over into the looting of Sudanese-run businesses.

Since the start of the war, observers have accused both the SAF and the RSF of singling out Christians for attack and destroying churches in areas that they control.

In Sudan, the largest Christian communities are in the Nuba Mountains region of South Kordofan state and Blue Nile state, which neighbor South Sudan. The Nuba Mountains are under the control of rebels from the secular Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement, and the region has remained largely untouched by the fighting that began in 2023.

The Nuba Christian population endured decades of oppression under Sudan’s former Islamist dictatorship. During the country’s second civil war (1983-2005), government forces subjected them to attacks that many scholars have described as genocidal. Countless people in the South Sudan were killed by Islamist militias or abducted to the north. Even though the slave raids have stopped, many Southern Sudanese are still enslaved and are exposed to the cruel arbitrariness of slave owners; others were born in slavery. To date, CSI has been able to free over 100,000 slaves.