Al Zorg, also rendered Al Zurq, El Zurug, or simply Zurug, is Sudan's only military base near the border with both Libya and Chad, and it sits within striking distance of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur. The plans that circulated for the town were ambitious: residential areas, a hospital, town squares, and an international airport. An engineer involved in construction said a helicopter airstrip had been approved, which was the kind of detail that told you the place was never just a town. The existing clinic and school use buildings left behind by UNAMID, the joint United Nations and African Union peacekeeping mission that withdrew from Darfur by 2021. There is a market that sells the goods markets sell. Life, or a version of it, continues. But the origins are not forgotten by the people who were driven out.

The Zaghawa have maintained that clashes between incoming Arab settlers and established Fur and Zaghawa farmers have been ongoing since at least 1997. They argue that the RSF used the same tactics employed by the Janjaweed during the Darfur genocide of the 2000s: terror campaigns, burned villages, displaced families. The RSF response, voiced by Juma Dagalo, is that the Mahariya wanted to settle down, that the land was essentially theirs by older arrangement. The dispute is not academic. Land rights in Darfur have been contested through centuries of sultanates and colonial administration, but the specific scale of displacement around Al Zorg, on the order of 140,000 people, is a modern crime that the international community has largely filed away without pursuing accountability.

Al Zorg's location is a quiet kind of genius, from the RSF perspective. The town sits on supply lines that run from Libya, where weapons and fuel have historically flowed through Mahariya trading networks, toward the interior of Sudan. Chad is right there too, and the Chadian frontier has been crucial to the RSF in the current civil war. The coordinates place Al Zorg in an area of North Darfur with minimal Sudanese government presence before 2017, few roads that the army could easily travel, and vast stretches of semi-desert in which small motorized forces have an enormous advantage over slower conventional troops. The RSF recognized this geography and built for it.

In January 2024, Sudanese Air Force strikes targeted the village's military base and Juma Dagalo's own home. Six of his assistants were killed along with twelve other people, homes destroyed. In February, more airstrikes near the main market killed dozens. These are the deaths that rarely make international headlines but accumulate relentlessly in the ledger of a civil war. On 21 December 2024, the Joint Darfur Force, led in part by Minni Minnawi of the Sudan Liberation Movement, launched a surprise assault. Five hours of combat against six RSF garrisons. The RSF was pushed out. A JDF officer stood on video behind burning buildings and announced they had incinerated the town and planned to advance further. One day later, on 22 December, the RSF recaptured it.

Al Zorg is not a city anyone will write a guidebook about. It is a strategic node in a war that has displaced millions of Sudanese, and it is built on the forced displacement of people who had lived here before. The market keeps selling. The clinic keeps stitching wounds as best it can. Sudanese air force jets come and go. The Joint Darfur Force and the RSF trade control with lethal regularity. At some point the war will end. What will remain, in the rebuilt or depopulated version of Al Zorg, is an open question about return: whether the Fur and Zaghawa families who were forced out in 2017 will be allowed to come back to what was once Dogi, or whether the name that the RSF imposed will calcify into permanence. The answer depends on who wins, and also on who remembers.