Twenty-one people were killed on Sunday, September 8, in shootings attributed to paramilitaries in a market in Sennar, in the south-east of Sudan, a day after the country’s leaders rejected an independent force to protect civilians.
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The Sudanese Doctors Network, which gave the death toll at 21, also reported more than 70 people injured in the attack on September 8 in Sennar in the southeast of the country. SudanAn attack that he attributed to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitaries under the command of General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo, who are fighting against the army of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane.
Sudan has been ravaged by a bloody conflict between the army and paramilitary forces since April 2023. It has already left tens of thousands dead and triggered one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.
Sennar Statewhich was already home to more than half a million displaced people before the fighting according to the World Organization for Migration (IOM), connects central Sudan to the south-east, controlled by the army and where hundreds of thousands of other displaced people have found refuge. In August, a paramilitary attack left at least 80 dead in a locality in this state, a medical source and witnesses reported.
Crimes against humanity
Experts from the UN Human Rights Council called on Friday, September 6, for ” deployment without delay “of a force” independent and impartial ” protection of civilians in the country. They claimed that the Sudanese belligerents had committed ” a horrific series of human rights violations and international crimes, many of which can be described as crimes against humanity. »
The experts’ recommendation regarding the deployment of an independent force was dismissed out of hand by Sudanese diplomacy, which denounced a ” flagrant violation of its mandate ” by the UN mission.
” Protection of civilians remains a top priority for the Sudanese government “, the Foreign Ministry said, accusing the ” militias to systematically target civilians and civilian institutions ” He considered that ” the role ” of the Human Rights Council should be ” support the national process rather than seeking to impose a different external mechanism “, rejecting the call for an arms embargo.
Meanwhile the war continues
The war, which led to the displacement of more than ten million peopleparticularly in neighbouring countries, has caused a very serious humanitarian crisis, according to the UN. The level of urgency is shocking, as is the inaction to stem the conflict and address the suffering caused “, warned the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, on Sunday, September 8.
On a visit to Port Sudan (east), he called ” the world to wake up and help pull Sudan out of the nightmare it is living in “, expressing alarm at a press conference of the ” near collapse of a large part of the health system “.
According to him, about 70 to 80 percent of health infrastructure is not fully functioning and the humanitarian sector, which had requested $2.7 billion in aid for 14.7 million Sudanese in urgent need, has received less than half of that.
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