(Port Sudan) Eighty people were killed and many others injured in a paramilitary attack on a village in the southeastern state of Sennar, more than 16 months after the start of the war in Sudan, a medical source and witnesses reported on Friday.
“We received 55 dead and dozens of injured at the hospital on Thursday, among them 25 died on Friday, bringing the death toll to 80,” a medical source working at the hospital in the village of Jalgini told AFP on Friday.
“Yesterday morning [jeudi]”Three armed vehicles attacked Jalgini, the residents resisted, causing the paramilitaries to withdraw and return with dozens of vehicles,” a Jalgini resident carrying his injured son to hospital told AFP.
“They opened fire, burning houses and killing a number of people, some corpses still litter the streets of the village on Friday,” he added.
Since late June, paramilitaries have controlled Sinja, the capital of Sennar. Fighting between the army and paramilitaries in Sennar state has since displaced nearly 726,000 people, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
Sennar state, which was already home to more than half a million displaced people before the fighting, according to the IOM, links central Sudan to the army-controlled southeast, where hundreds of thousands more displaced people have sought refuge.
The paramilitaries control most of the capital Khartoum, the central state of al-Jazeera, the vast region of Darfur (west) and large parts of Kordofan (south).
The war in Sudan has been pitting the army, under the command of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane, against the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by his former deputy, General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo, since April 2023.
It has pushed the country to the brink of famine, according to the UN, and left tens of thousands dead, with some estimates putting the number at 150,000, according to US envoy to Sudan Tom Perriello.
It also displaced more than 10 million people within the country and ravaged infrastructure.
Both sides have been accused of war crimes for deliberately targeting civilians and blocking humanitarian aid.