In Adré, a Chadian town located on the border with Sudan at war since April 15, 2023, survivors give chilling testimonies of the massacres committed in Darfur. Reporting.
3 mins
With our correspondent in Ndjamena, Carol Valade
In Sudan, it has been three months since the conflict between two rival generals plunged the country into a bloody war which has already claimed more than 3,000 lives, a figure probably underestimated according to experts. The violence has pushed 3 million people on the roads of exile, according to the UN, which fears a tipping point in an “ethnic conflict”, and “total civil war”.
Some Sudanese find refuge in neighboring countries such as Chad where up to 2,000 of them cross the border every day. In the border town of Adré, survivors of the Darfur massacres tell chilling stories.
” They massacred without pity, the women, the children, the old people, even the cattle »
In the Adré high school, which has become a makeshift camp welcoming more than 120,000 Sudanese. Nadia Ahmat Abdramane says: “ Their goal is to exterminate us. They massacred without pity, the women, the children, the old people, even the cattle, nobody was spared. They even slaughtered a baby. They chased us as we fled with their vehicles. They machine-gunned defenseless civilians who wanted to run away. From el-Geneina [capitale du Darfour occidental, NDLR] so far I have seen bodies all over the road. It was Hemedti’s men who did this, and also the Arab militias who are their allies. »
Their testimonies confirm the worst fears expressed by the UN. For Adoum Mahamat Ahamt, of the National Commission for the Reception, Reintegration of Refugees and Repatriated Women, ethnic cleansing is underway: ” The situation is dramatic. It became a manhunt. We enter people’s homes, we chase you, we kill you, or we rob you, or we see you again from your house. This is what the refugees told us. It’s enough that you don’t have a fair enough complexion like the Arabs. They go house to house, especially at night. We know where you are, we look for you, we kill you at night. »
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The first aid workers to arrive in el-Geneina tell of a devastated town where dead silence reigns, but no corpses in the streets. The city would have been cleaned in a desire to hide, say several sources. But the UN has already confirmed the existence of a first mass grave, containing a hundred bodies.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has also launched a war crimes investigation in the Sudanese region of Darfur, where at least 87 people belonging to the Massalit community, including women and children, were buried in a mass grave. She calls for not allowing “ history repeating itself “, in reference to the civil war which began in 2003 in Darfur, qualified as genocide by the United States and which made more than 300,000 dead.
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