More than one million children have been displaced by the fighting in Sudan, 270,000 of them in the Darfur region, according to UNICEF, which has warned that more are at “grave risk.”
Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the commander of the army, and Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, his former deputy and the head of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), have been engaged in violent conflict in Sudan since mid-April.
In addition to the more than one million people who have been displaced, UNICEF said that at least 330 children have died and more than 1,900 have been injured.
“Many more are in serious danger,”
An estimated 13 million youngsters, according to the UN organization, were in “dire need” of humanitarian relief.
Children are “trapped in an unrelenting nightmare, bearing the heaviest burden of a violent crisis they had no hand in creating,” said UNICEF Sudan representative Mandeep O’Brien. “Children are caught in the crossfire, injured, abused, displaced, and subject to disease and malnutrition.”
It said that the situation in Darfur, which had already been marred by a two-decade conflict that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and left more than two million people homeless, was particularly grave.
According to UNICEF, the situation in West and Central Darfur is characterized by ongoing fighting, extreme insecurity, and looting of relief institutions and supplies.
The Janjaweed forces that previous strongman Omar al-Bashir sent against ethnic minorities in the area in 2003, prompting accusations of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, are where the Daglo’s RSF got its start.
Its paramilitaries are alleged to have killed West Darfur state governor Khamis Abdullah Abakar on Wednesday, just hours after he voiced his opinions against the paramilitaries in a phone interview with a Saudi TV station. The RSF has disclaimed all liability.
The Darfur Lawyers Association denounced the conduct of “barbarism, brutality, and cruelty,” while the United Nations stated that “compelling eyewitness accounts attribute this act to Arab militias and the RSF.”
“All those responsible for this killing must be held accountable, including those who bear command responsibility,” Jeremy Laurence, a spokesperson for the UN rights office, told reporters in Geneva.
“Ominous remark”
According to the U.S. State Department, the RSF was “primarily” responsible for the atrocities occurring in West Darfur, which served as a “ominous reminder” of the region’s earlier genocide.
Speaking on behalf of the State Department, Matthew Miller said, “The United States condemns in the strongest terms the ongoing human rights violations and abuses and horrific violence in Sudan, particularly reports of widespread sexual violence and killings based on ethnicity in West Darfur by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and affiliated militias.”
Today’s crimes in West Darfur and other locations serve as a chilling reminder of the terrible incidents that prompted the United States to declare Darfur to be the site of a genocide in 2004.
According to Miller, there have been up to 1,100 civilian deaths in the city of El Geneina, the state seat of West Darfur.
“While the RSF and affiliated militia are primarily to blame for the atrocities occurring in Darfur, both sides have been accountable for abuses,” he continued.
According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, the conflict, which is now in its third month, has resulted in the deaths of almost 2,000 people.
528,000 of the 2.2 million individuals who were displaced by the violence, according to the International Organization for Migration, fled to nearby nations.
The combat has continued uninterrupted despite numerous futile ceasefire attempts, and mediation efforts are at a stalemate.
According to witnesses, the regular army carried out airstrikes in Khartoum North, which is located directly across the Blue Nile from the capital, drawing anti-aircraft fire from the RSF.
At least three individuals were killed and numerous homes were damaged in an airstrike that struck Omdurman’s Beit Al-Mal neighborhood, according to the “resistance committee” for the area.
The RSF said that 20 people were killed in the attack, some of them were inside a mosque, and charged the regular army, which effectively controls the sky, with conducting numerous airstrikes on residential areas.
