CAIRO — Fighters from the notorious paramilitary Rapid Support Forces ran riot in east-central Sudan in a multi-day attack that killed more than 120 people in one town, a doctors group and the United Nations said.
It was the group’s latest attack against the Sudanese military after suffering a series of setbacks, losing ground to the military in the area. The war, which has been going on for more than a year and a half, has wrecked the African country, displacing millions of its population and pushing it to the brink of a full-blown famine.
Rapid Support Forces fighters went on a rampage in villages and towns on the eastern and northern sides of the province of Gezira between Oct. 20 and 25, shooting at civilians and sexually attacking women and girls, the United Nations said in a statement Saturday, adding that they looted private and public properties, including open markets.
The attack displaced more than 46,500 people in the city of Tamboul and other villages in eastern and northern Gezira last week, according to Sunday’s data from the International Organization for Migration’s Tracking Matrix.
“The killings and appalling human rights violations in Gezira province intensify the unacceptable human toll this conflict has taken on the people of Sudan,” International Organization for Migration Director General Amy Pope told The Associated Press ahead of her trip to the country next week.
She called for concerted international efforts to stop the conflict, saying: “There is no time to lose. Millions of lives are in the balance.”
“These are atrocious crimes,” Clementine Nkweta-Salami, U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Sudan, said in a statement Saturday. “Women, children, and the most vulnerable are bearing the brunt of a conflict that has already taken far too many lives.”
She said the attacks resembled the horrors committed during the Darfur genocide in the early 2000s, including sexual violence and mass killings.
The Rapid Support Forces were born out of Arab militias, commonly known as Janjaweed, mobilized by ex-Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir against populations in Darfur that identify as Central or East African. At the time, the Janjaweed were accused of mass killings, rapes and other atrocities, and Darfur became synonymous with genocide. Janjaweed groups still aid the Rapid Support Forces.
The Sudanese Doctors’ Union said in a statement that at least 124 people were killed and 200 others were wounded in the town of Sariha, adding that the group rounded up at least 150 others. It called on the U.N. Security Council to pressure the Rapid Support Forces to open “safe corridors” to enable aid groups to reach people in impacted villages.
“There is no way to help the injured or evacuate them for treatment,” the statement said.
Footage circulating online, some shared by Rapid Support Forces fighters themselves, showed members of the paramilitary group abusing detained people. One video showed a man wearing a military uniform grabbing an old man by the chin and dragging him around as other armed men chanted in the background.
