The Masalit are a non-Arab ethnic group indigenous to the border region between Sudan's Darfur and eastern Chad. They farm. They speak Masalit. They are Muslims, like most of their Arab neighbors, but they are not Arabs, and that distinction has been weaponized against them for more than two decades. The original Darfur genocide of 2003-2005 killed perhaps 200,000 people and displaced millions. Many of the dead were Masalit. The Janjaweed, Arab militias armed and directed by Khartoum, carried out most of the killing. The Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group that would later plunge Sudan into civil war, grew directly from those same Janjaweed. By 2022, the Masalit had been the targets of what many scholars call a slow-motion genocide for nearly twenty years. Kreinik's residents knew all of this. They had fled it, many of them, already.

On April 21, 2022, two Arab men were killed near Kreinik by unknown assailants. Within hours, Rizeigat Arab militiamen and fighters from the Rapid Support Forces were moving on the town. The first attack hit the town square on April 22, killing nine people. From there the violence spread to twenty-five neighboring villages, almost all of them Masalit. The attackers did not limit themselves to fighters. They shot worshippers leaving the Kreinik mosque. They attacked schools and houses. They stormed the Kreinik hospital, which had been, until that morning, the only place for wounded people to go. On April 25 the fighting reached El Geneina, the state capital. Doctors reported civilians shot in several neighborhoods. A French Médecins Sans Frontières worker was killed at the Geneina Teaching Hospital, which was itself under attack. Survivors told reporters that Sudanese Army units stationed nearby did nothing to intervene.

The numbers rose through the week. By April 26, The Guardian reported at least 200 dead. Dabanga, a Sudanese outlet, put the figure at 168 dead and 110 injured. The real total is almost certainly higher. Families in Kreinik lost children, parents, siblings. Markets burned. Grain stores burned. The food insecurity that followed was immediate and severe, made worse because Janjaweed fighters looted what they did not destroy. Survivors buried their dead in hasty graves or could not reach the bodies at all. Khamis Abakar, the former Masalit leader who had been appointed governor of West Darfur after the 2019 revolution, survived an assassination attempt on April 28. Fifteen months later, during the 2023 civil war, the RSF would capture him and execute him on camera.

By early May, Masalit self-defense groups had retaken the center of Kreinik, though the roads into town remained under Janjaweed and RSF control. Most residents left anyway, to El Geneina or to refugee camps across the border in Chad, where many remained as of 2023. When a Le Monde reporter visited Kreinik in February 2023, the town was what they called "a burned-out spectre." Houses stood empty. Whole neighborhoods had been reduced to charred walls. The hospital, rebuilt by MSF in December 2022 at a cost they could measure, reopened. But the people who had filled that hospital's waiting rooms in April 2022 were mostly gone, scattered across the Sahel or buried in Kreinik's earth.

Hemedti, the commander of the Rapid Support Forces, issued a statement expressing his condolences and blamed both sides. The Sudanese minister of defense claimed to have sent reinforcements. Neither action changed anything. Less than a year after the Kreinik massacre, Hemedti's RSF turned on the Sudanese Armed Forces and launched the civil war that has now devastated Khartoum, Darfur, and much of Sudan. In 2023 the RSF returned to El Geneina and Kreinik with heavier weapons and carried out massacres that dwarfed what happened in April 2022. The Masalit are now being driven across the border into Chad in numbers that human rights organizations describe as ethnic cleansing. Kreinik 2022 was not an isolated event. It was a warning that was not heeded, and the people who issued it were, overwhelmingly, the people who paid for being right.