Paramilitary forces killed greater than 100 civilians in an assault on a metropolis in southern Sudan on Thursday, in accordance with an affiliation of medical doctors, within the newest large-scale accusation of an atrocity of the nation’s civil conflict.
The paramilitary fighters, known as the Fast Help Forces, stated on Thursday that that they had attacked town of Nahud, which had been held by the Sudanese army alongside a freeway connecting territory it holds with Darfur — a western area that has turn into a stronghold for the Fast Help Forces.
Not less than 542 civilians have been killed within the area in simply three weeks, the U.N. human rights chief, Volker Türk, stated on Thursday, including that the true toll is probably going a lot larger.
“The horror unfolding in Sudan is aware of no bounds,” he stated in a statement concerning the conflict. “My fears are all of the better given the ominous warning by the R.S.F. of ‘bloodshed’ forward of imminent battles.”
The Sudanese army drove Fast Help Forces fighters out of Khartoum, the country’s capital, in March, however since then the paramilitary group has declared its own government within the areas that it controls, and pressed a significant offensive to grab all of Darfur.
The medical doctors’ group, the Sudan Medical doctors Community, said that Fast Help Forces fighters had carried out a “large-scale bloodbath” in Nahud on Thursday night time, with 21 kids and 15 ladies among the many lifeless. The group stated that the troops had additionally looted a medical provide warehouse, markets, pharmacies and a hospital.
The assault “stripped town of its final technique of well being care and halted medical companies for a lot of sufferers and injured people who depend on them,” the group stated on social media.
The toll didn’t embody army personnel, and was prone to rise, the group added.
The Sudan Conflict Monitor, a gaggle of journalists and researchers who observe the civil conflict, now in its third yr, stated that the Sudanese army had lost the city on Thursday, leaving it and not using a key hub to push into Fast Help Forces territory in Darfur.
A Sudanese army spokesman, Nabil Abdallah, denied that Nahud had fallen to the Fast Help Forces and stated the army nonetheless managed town, in accordance with the conflict monitor.
Thursday’s assault got here because the Fast Help Forces pressed its lengthy siege on El Fasher, the final main metropolis in Darfur that it doesn’t management, and because the Sudanese army and the Fast Help Forces face new accusations of atrocities.
Final month, aid groups and the United Nations said that Fast Help Forces fighters killed the complete employees of a medical clinic in a famine-stricken camp in Darfur, killing lots of and forcing as many as 400,000 others to flee the camp.
Regardless of the Fast Help Forces withdrawal from the capital and the urging of officers like Mr. Türk, of the U.N., and others, many diplomats and support employees consider that the conflict’s finish is way from sight.
The conflict started as an alliance between the military and the Rapid Support Forces crumbled in 2023. The paramilitary group’s declaration of a parallel authorities, within the western and southern areas it controls, has raised fears of a long-term partition of the huge African nation alongside the traces of the disastrous break up in Libya since 2011.
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