CAIRO, Egypt
Tribal clashes between Arabs and non-Arabs in Sudan’s war-ravaged Darfur region Sunday killed 168 people, a local aid group said, one of the deadliest bouts of violence in the country in recent years.
The fighting in West Darfur
province comes as Sudan has been plunged into turmoil since a military coup
last year. The takeover upended the country’s transition to democracy after a
popular uprising forced the removal of longtime autocrat Omar al-Bashir in
April 2019.
The clashes raise questions
over whether military leaders are capable of bringing security to Darfur, which
has been wracked by years of civil war. In 2020, the U.N. Security Council
ended its peacekeeping mission known there.
Adam Regal, spokesman for the
General Coordination for Refugees and Displaced in Darfur, said Sunday’s
fighting in West Darfur’s Kreinik area also wounded 98 people.
The fighting grew out of the
killing of two people by unknown assailants Thursday, he said.
Early Sunday, large numbers of
people armed with heavy weapons launched a major attack on Kreinik, torching
and looting properties, Regal said. The fighting lasted for several hours and
forced thousands of people to flee their homes, he said.
Regal, whose group provides
food and other assistance to displaced people in the region, shared footage of
destroyed houses in the area, with some images showing pick-up trucks mounted
with machine guns.
The clashes eventually reached
Genena, where militias and armed groups attacked wounded people while they were
being treated at the city’s main hospital, said Salah Saleh, a doctor and
former medical director at the hospital.
“The area was burned down, and
many people were killed ... There was no intervention” from the local
government to stop the fighting, he said.
Authorities said they deployed
more troops and a military aircraft to the region since fighting on Thursday
left eight dead and at least 16 wounded.
Volker Perthes, the U.N. envoy
for Sudan, deplored “the heinous killings of civilians ... as well as the
attacks on health facilities” in West Darfur.
He called for an in-depth and
transparent investigation and to hold those responsible accountable.
Darfur has seen bouts of
deadly fighting between rival tribes in recent months as the country remains
mired in a wider crisis following the October coup. Kreinik was the scene of
clashes in December that killed at least 88 people.
The Security Council
terminated the peace-keeping mission UNAMID on Dec. 31, 2020. Since then,
sporadic intercommunal clashes have increased in the region.
In December, Human Rights
Watch urged the U.N. to deploy monitors to Darfur, saying that the departure of
UNAMID caused a “gap in monitoring the abuses” fuelled by impunity for
atrocities committed in in the region.
The yearslong Darfur conflict
broke out when rebels from the territory’s ethnic central and sub-Saharan
African community launched an insurgency in 2003, complaining of oppression by
the Arab-dominated government in the capital, Khartoum.
The government of al-Bashir
responded with a campaign of aerial bombings and raids by the janjaweed
militias, which have been accused of mass killings and rapes. Up to 300,000
people were killed and 2.7 million were driven from their homes in Darfur over
the years.
Al-Bashir, who has been in
prison in Khartoum since his ouster, is wanted by the International Criminal
Court over charges of genocide and crimes against humanity related to the
Darfur conflict.
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