(Nairobi) The African Union (AU) condemned Friday “in the strongest terms” the “massacre” perpetrated Wednesday by a group of paramilitaries in a village in Sudan where around 150 civilians were killed “indiscriminately” including “ at least 35 children.
The chairperson of the AU Commission, Moussa Faki, who urged “the international community to put an end once and for all” to the war in Sudan, said he was “alarmed” by the fact that “the situation » in this country “continues to deteriorate and leads to acute hunger, even famine, in various regions of Sudan”.
Mr. Faki also called on all parties to “unconditionally end the fighting, and facilitate unhindered humanitarian access to the population in need.”
Around 18 million people in Sudan suffer from hunger and 3.6 million children from acute malnutrition, according to UN agencies.
Since April 2023, Sudan has been in the grip of a war between the army, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane, and the FSR paramilitaries of his former deputy turned rival, General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo.
According to pro-democracy activists, the RSF attacked the village of Wad al-Noura in the center of the country twice with heavy artillery on Wednesday, killing more than 100 people and wounding hundreds.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres also “strongly condemned” this attack on Thursday, while reiterating his call to “silence the guns across Sudan and embark on the path to lasting peace”.
For its part, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) warned Thursday that the number of internally displaced people in the country could “exceed 10 million” in the coming days.
Since the start of the conflict, more than seven million people have fled their homes to seek refuge in other regions of Sudan – which already had 2.8 million people displaced over decades of wars that have ravaged the country.
Around “40 dead” in artillery fire
Pro-democracy activists in Sudan reported Friday that around 40 civilians were killed in “violent artillery fire” by paramilitaries on neighborhoods of Omdurman, near the capital Khartoum, yet another illustration of the impact of the conflict on a population devastated by a humanitarian crisis.
The “Karari resistance committee”, named after one of the neighborhoods of Omdourman, in the northwest suburbs of Khartoum, blames the artillery strikes carried out Thursday on the Rapid Support Forces (FSR), at war against the Sudanese army since April 2023.
“Until now, the number of deaths is estimated at 40 citizens, and there are more than 50 injured, some seriously,” underlines the committee, one of the many networks of activists organizing the mutual aid between residents, and which have flourished in recent years.
“There is not yet a precise count of the number of victims in Omdurman,” adds the committee, which specified that the shooting particularly affected “residential neighborhoods” in the Karari sector.
“Most of the dead arrived at al-Nao University Hospital, the others in private hospitals or they were buried by their families.”