Sudan: RSF kill almost 300 civilians in raids on villages
Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have raided and set fire to villages in North Kordofan, killing almost 300 people, according to Africanews on July 15th.
Sudanese human rights group, The Emergency Lawyers, says that on July 12th, the RSF launched a wave of coordinated attacks on a series of villages in close proximity to the city of Bara in North Kordofan, which is currently controlled by the paramilitary group. The village of Shag Alnom witnessed the worst of the violence, with over 200 people there being either shot or “burned inside their homes.”
Various other villages were the target of looting raids, in which a further 38 civilians were killed. Dozens of other people are missing. According to the rights group, the RSF then attacked the village of Hilat Hamid on July 13th, where they killed another 46 people, including children and pregnant women.
The United Nations revealed that over 3,400 people were forced to flee their homes due to the attacks, according to The Guardian on July 15th.
These crimes have been a recurring feature of Sudan’s highly destructive civil war, which erupted in April 2023 amid a power struggle between the Sudanese Military and the RSF. The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced a further 14 million. The UN has previously warned that the war has created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with an estimated 25 million people–roughly half the total population–facing extreme levels of hunger.
Emergency Lawyers placed sole responsibility for the North Kordofan attacks on the RSF leadership. They released a statement which outlined that “it has been proven that these targeted villages were completely empty of any military objectives, which makes clear the criminal nature of these crimes carried out in complete disregard of international humanitarian law.”
The RSF recently killed eight civilians in an attack on a shelter in the besieged city of El-Fasher in North Darfur, which further illuminates the group’s belligerence towards innocent victims of the devastating civil war. A top UN official recently warned that the risk of genocide occurring in Sudan is “very high” as the RSF “continue to conduct ethnically motivated attacks against the Zaghawa, Masalit and Fur groups.”
Africanews, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Maghrebi.org, United Nations
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