At least 100 people were killed and dozens more injured after the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) attacked a village in Gezira province in Sudan on Wednesday.
Women and children were among the victims in the RSF attacks on Wad al-Noura village in Gezira, Mini Arko Minawi, the governor of Darfur province, said on X.
A grassroots group set up to protect people in Wad Madani, the capital city of Gezira, said late on Wednesday on social media that the paramilitary force, which has been fighting the Sudanese army for over a year, used heavy artillery to attack the village.
The Madani Resistance Committee, which has been threatened and attacked by the RSF in the past, accused the paramilitaries of looting during the attacks, which it said started on Wednesday morning.
The RSF claimed in December that it had seized control of Wad Madani, which lies about 60 miles (100km) south-east of Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, and is where hundreds of thousands of people displaced by fighting have fled to.
The resistance committee said the group invaded the village, displacing people including women and children to other parts of the district of al-Manaqil.
In a statement on its Telegram channel the Sudanese transitional government condemned the attacks and called for the international community to hold the RSF accountable.
“These are criminal acts that reflect the systematic behaviour of these (RSF) militias in targeting civilians, plundering their property, and forcibly displacing them from their areas,” said the media office for the Transitional Sovereignty Council, which was set up after the longtime president Omar al-Bashir was ousted in 2019.
The RSF alleged on X late on Wednesday that the Sudanese military planned to attack its troops in Jabal al-Awliya, in the west of al-Manaqil district, by mobilising the armed forces in three bases. The Associated Press could not verify this allegation.
The paramilitary group said it attacked three camps west, north and south of Wad-al Noura, clashing with the Sudanese army.
“Our forces will not stand idly by in the face of any movements or gatherings by the enemy and will work to pursue and defeat the enemy,” the RSF said.
The war between the RSF and the Sudanese army has devastated the country as clashes spread across multiple cities and pushed its population to the brink of famine. More than 14,000 people have been killed and thousands have been wounded. Hundreds of thousands have been displaced.
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