‘Up to 100’ dead in RSF attack on Sudanese village: activists | Conflict news

The Wad Madani Resistance Committee has released photos of a “mass grave” and claimed that the army ignored villagers’ cries for help.

According to local democracy activists, “up to 100” people were killed in an attack by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on a village in central Sudan.

The Wad Madani Resistance Committees reported on social media late Wednesday that the RSF, which has been at war with the regular army for more than a year, had attacked the village of Wad al-Noura in Gezira state “in two waves” using heavy artillery.

The committees released photos of dozens of bodies wrapped for burial in a “mass grave” in the public square. They claimed the Sudanese army had ignored a request for help, saying it was “waiting for a confirmed number of dead and injured”.

An immediate verification of the report was not possible.

The RSF has repeatedly besieged and attacked entire villages across Sudan, particularly in the agrarian state of Gezira, where it took control of the capital, Wad Madani, in December.

In a statement on Wednesday, the group said it had attacked army and allied militia bases around Wad al-Noura, but did not acknowledge any civilian casualties.

But Wad Madani resistance committees accused the organization of deadly attacks on civilians and looting, as well as forcing women and children to seek refuge in the nearby town of Managil.

The army’s allied transitional council condemned the reported attack.

“These are criminal acts that reflect the systematic approach of these militias in their attacks on civilians,” it said in a statement.

“Time is running out”

The civil war in Sudan broke out in April 2023 when a rivalry between Sudanese army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his deputy and RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo escalated into open conflict.

While the initial fighting took place largely around the capital Khartoum, it quickly spread to other parts of Sudan, including the southwestern state of Darfur. There, fighting quickly took on an inter-ethnic dimension as old rivalries from an earlier war that began in 2003 flared up again.

The RSF emerged from the so-called Janjaweed, an Arab force that killed thousands of non-Arabs during a war in Darfur that ended with a peace agreement in 2020.

The war of the last 14 months has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people, destroyed infrastructure and paralyzed the Sudanese economy.

Some 8.3 million people have been displaced, many of them forced to move to neighboring Chad and South Sudan, while hunger and starvation are rampant.

“Time is running out for millions of people in Sudan. They are at imminent risk of famine, displaced from their land, living under bombardment and cut off from humanitarian assistance,” United Nations agencies warned in a joint statement last week.

The RSF have taken over most of western Sudan and are now trying to advance into the center of the country.

Meanwhile, renewed fighting broke out between the army and the town of El-Fasher in the west of the country, with both sides using heavy weapons and artillery.

Claire Nicolet, head of emergency relief in Sudan for Doctors Without Borders, said the conflict was having a catastrophic impact on the population.

“If the situation continues like this, there will really be a very high mortality rate – that’s for sure,” she told Al Jazeera.