Opinion | ‘Don’t Kill My Child. Kill Me Instead.’

Side by side with the worst of humanity, you regularly encounter the best. And so it was that while covering murder, rape and starvation in Sudan, I was awed by a heroic refugee, Naima Adam.

I’m on the Chad-Sudan border reporting on atrocities against Black African ethnic groups in Sudan, wrenchingly similar to the Darfur genocide here two decades ago. To report here is to appreciate that “evil” is not just an archaic Hebrew Bible term, but a force still powerful in the 21st century.

And yet: When civilization collapses and we humans are tested, some people reveal themselves as sociopaths, but a remarkable number turn out to be saints like Naima.

Naima, 48, is a member of one of the Black ethnic groups that have been targeted by destructive extremists in Sudan’s Arab leadership. Four times in the last 20 years Arab marauders have burned her home in their efforts at ethnic cleansing of non-Arab groups, and the Janjaweed Arab militia murdered her husband nine years ago.

After two military factions started a civil war in 2023, one of them — a descendant of the Janjaweed called the Rapid Support Forces, armed and supported by the United Arab Emirates — tried once again to drive Black Africans from Darfur. Naima recounted the same pattern I heard from so many people: The militia surrounded her village, lined up men and boys, then shot them one by one.

“We’re going to get rid of this Black trash,” she quoted the Arab gunmen saying.

Then the gunmen went house to house to kill, plunder and rape. Mostly, those they raped were girls and women, she said, but they also raped at least one man.

Two men took one of Naima’s daughters into a room and closed the door; she suspects they raped the girl, but sexual violence is such a taboo that she never asked her daughter what happened. Rape survivors bear the trauma on their own, and while a civil society group has formed a women’s center on the border to help, it is a struggle to find funding.

With the militia killing even young boys, Naima was terrified the gunmen would murder her 10-year-old son, Nazir. So she put Nazir on her back, the way Sudanese moms carry young children, to make him seem smaller.

A gunman saw through the ruse and demanded that she hand Nazir over.

“He’s a boy,” the man shouted. “Kill him!”

“Don’t kill my child,” Naima pleaded. “Kill me instead.”

One man clubbed Naima with the butt of his rifle to try to grab the boy. Another raised his gun and shot Naima twice, through the breast and in the leg; she showed me the scars. Both were flesh wounds, and even as she bled she fought and would not surrender her son.

Some men in the militia think it is bad luck to shoot a woman, and perhaps for that reason the attackers retreated and went on to attack the next house. Naima and her children were able to escape and find refuge in another village.

But the Rapid Support Forces then attacked this new location, she said, and this time they grabbed Naima’s 14-year-old niece to rape. Naima blocked them and told them to rape her instead.

So two of the gunmen men stripped Naima naked and held her down, she said, while one of the attackers pulled down his pants and prepared to rape her. This was hard for her to talk about, but eventually she explained how she stopped the assault: She grabbed the man’s penis and yanked.

“I bent it like this,” she said, demonstrating a furious shaking movement. “I tried to break it.”

The man clubbed her with his gun and was ready to shoot her, but his partner was rattled and told him to leave her alone, she said. They left without raping her or her niece.

Naima may single-handedly have done more to disincentivize rape in Sudan than all the world leaders put together.

Naima’s mother was murdered, and her father and one of her sons are missing and may be dead. She led the surviving members of her family to the safety of a refugee camp across the border in Adré, Chad, where one of her adult sons remains hospitalized after brutal torture in Sudan. He suffered a mental breakdown and can’t talk about what he endured.

Nazir has nightmares but is recovering. He is devoted to his mother and told me gravely that he understands that she was shot for saving his life.

As for Naima, she has recovered from the bullet wounds but is impoverished. I asked if she was sending Nazir to school in the camp. She laughed at the idea that she could afford school fees. “I was embarrassed that I couldn’t make tea for you,” she said. “I have nothing.”

Yet she still supports orphans in the refugee camp. Helping those in danger is a priority for her.

I asked her whether she wanted revenge against the Sudanese Arabs who had caused her so much tragedy. Would she favor attacking Arab villages, killing the men and raping the women?

She looked shocked at the question. “We are human beings,” she told me firmly. “We are Muslims. We have principles. We don’t want this to happen to the Arabs.”

In one sense, Naima is exceptional; in another, she reflects the magnificent response of so many ordinary Sudanese and Chadians to the recent atrocities. Sudan has been largely abandoned by the world, including by President Biden and other leaders. But Sudanese civil society has been as heroic as the country’s military leadership has been deplorable.

Sudanese doctors work without pay, local groups set up soup kitchens and refugee volunteers train child victims of trauma to make handicrafts that they can sell to earn money. I spoke to one of these trainers, Um Salama Umar, who said that the Rapid Support Forces had murdered two of her sons and three of her sisters; now she tries to heal by helping traumatized children rebuild their lives.

Anybody who wants to help might consider grass-roots groups in the Mutual Aid Sudan coalition, MutualAidSudan.org.

So, yes, Sudan reveals the human capacity for evil, but it’s also a reminder of an equally powerful human capacity for strength, resilience and courage. It’s thus possible to return from a land aching from famine, massacres and rape and feel honored to be part of the same gallant species as those Sudanese like Naima who emerge from an ultimate test as moral exemplars for us all.

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