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xiii All genocides have a past, pre­sent, and ­ future. In our quest to learn about the Dar- fur Genocide, it is imperative to remember this ­simple truth in order to avoid the com- mon error of mistaking dates as definitive, statistics as representative, and accumulated knowledge as understanding. Ultimately, any true study of genocide requires its stu- dents, myself included, to grapple with a real­ity that is too tangled to unwind and too dark to fully illuminate. When Western media outlets first reported on the eruption of vio­lence in the Darfur region of Western Sudan in 2003, they attempted to simply describe the seed of the conflict as racial vio­lence so that their read- ers could comprehend the confrontation that secretary of state Colin Powell would ­U.S. later call a genocide. Journalists reported that “Arabs” ­were killing “Africans,” thus framing the vio­lence as racially driven. The explanation of racial hatred was not a foreign concept for Westerners, even if Dar- fur and Sudan required an internet search to locate. Ever since images of the Holocaust (1939–1945) entered into our collective con- sciousness through print and visual media, the notion of genocide has had a strong asso- ciation with the attempted annihilation of an entire ­people. The killing of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda (1994) reinforced this image of racially or ethnically motivated genocide. So, the explanation of Darfur as a genocide motivated by racial hatred brought familiar clarity for ­ those in the West about an other­wise distant conflict. But this oversimplification allowed for uninformed assumptions about a ­ people and a place, due in part to the broader global con- text. The world had been forever changed just two years before the genocide began in Darfur, when al-­Qaeda terrorists launched an attack on the West on September 11, 2001, murdering nearly 3,000 ­people from more than fifty-­seven countries in a single day. For many years, Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, was painted as the poster child for Islamic extremism and the so-­called Arab world was depicted as the greatest ­enemy of Western Chris­tian­ity and democracy. Western confusion about Sudan was made worse by the fact that bin Laden had a history in the country, having spent years nurturing his nascent terrorist group ­there. Sudanese president Hassan al-­Turabi had welcomed bin Laden to the country in December 1991, and as he set up terrorist training camps, Turabi intensified his own Islamic extrem- ism through his party, the National Islamic Front (NIF). As one scholar has aptly explained, “if al-­Qaeda was not actually born in Sudan, it certainly developed its modus operandi in the bosom of al-­Turabi’s Preface