What will Saudi Arabia look like in 20 years? A Wahhabist theocracy? Still a monarchy, but presiding over an impoverished nation in the manner of the Nth Korean Kim dynasty? Or splintered back into distinct tribal nations, some more liberal than others? The last seems the most plausible to me.

It’s an incredibly undesirable nation to visit, in any way sensible to people from developed nations. And the cash burn on trying to do so is even more incredible. None of these big ticket entertainment initiatives have any lasting value. If they even get completed….

By the time this ends, if it ends, well over a half a million will have been murdered. Probably more.

But nothing will be said by the young liberal types. No, this is not part of the algorithm. And there will be no military intervention from the West. The old empires are gone and classic butchers like Kitchener won't be there in Khartoum to give "them a damn good dusting" either.

Much gets made of Christian Neo-con antics, but there's a particular kind of callousness that goes with Wahhabist petro-wealth. So armed with experience, money and armaments over another hundred thousand have died.

But the ethnic detente was never meant to last. Boosted with experience, Gulf State money and ongoing combat experience in Yemen (another ignored abbatoir) thanks to their ties to Saudi Arabia and the UAE in particular. The head of the RSF decided it was time to resume the agenda.

The Janjaweed played their role in the crisis in Darfur where hundreds of thosands dies earlier in the millenium. And now they have returned to Darfur, a far more honed force, due to their time of being incorporated into Sudan's security apparatus.

The RSF hail from the Janjaweed militias who have always extolled pan-Arabism in further contrast to the Sub-Saharan Africans, where Sudan sits in between these two worlds.

I didn’t realise until looking closely is that there is a racial motif to this. This is more than the extremely vague Hutu & Tutsi notion that still lead to people being hacked up en masse in Rawanda in '94.

It’s not as sexy when it’s the browns doing it to each other, doesn’t fit in the colour-coded "colonisation" narrative that the Israeli vs Arab contrast that's been in vogue for a while. Plus it's guided far more by media attention than many would like to say.

By the time this ends, if it ends, well over a half a million will have been murdered. Probably more.

But nothing will be said by the young liberal types. No, this is not part of the algorithm. And there will be no military intervention from the West. The old empires are gone and classic butchers like Kitchener won't be there in Khartoum to give "them a damn good dusting" either.

More will follow them, forced to dig their own graves, hauled behind cars, or shot and left where they were found.

Much gets made of Christian Neo-con antics, but there's a particular kind of callousness that goes with Wahhabist petro-wealth. So armed with experience, money and armaments over another hundred thousand have died.