UNESCO said on Friday it was “deeply concerned” that fighting in Sudan had spread to the island of Meroe, home to three World Heritage sites, calling on warring parties not to “target them”. “, nor to “use them for military purposes”.

The Paris-based United Nations Educational, Scientific and Training Organization demanded in a press release issued yesterday that “all” parties involved “fully comply with international law”, which states that such sites “must not be targeted, nor used for military purposes’.

Considering the “high risk” of “looting” being committed, UNESCO simultaneously called for “vigilance” at the international level by “law enforcement forces, actors of the art market and all cultural professionals” to respectively prevent and not participate in the trafficking of antiquities possibly stolen from Meroi.

On Tuesday, the NGO Regional Network for Cultural Rights condemned the “invasion of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the feared paramilitaries under General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, at war with the armed forces under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan from April 15, “in the archaeological sites of Naga and Musawarat es Sufra”.

This “second raid” took place on Sunday, the NGO noted, as “a first” took place “on December 3” at places of worship in Nile State (North).

The NGO cited “reliable sources, images and videos uploaded to social networking sites depicting battles between the army and the DTY”, adding that the archaeological sites “may have been exposed to vandalism, destruction, looting and theft”.

Nile state authorities also spoke of a “raid” by the DTY, which was “repelled by the air force”, adding that “calm has been restored”. However, they did not specify whether damage was found to archaeological sites.

According to UNESCO, the archaeological sites of the so-called island of Meroe, an area partially covered by desert between the Nile and Atbara, was the seat of the kingdom of Kush, which occupied what is now Egypt for almost a century, and include “pyramids , temples, residential buildings and large water resources management facilities’.

The ancient civilizations of Sudan had built more pyramids than those of Egypt, yet they remain comparatively unknown and unrecognized. The so-called island of Meroe, on the east bank of the Nile River, 220 kilometers north of Khartoum, has nevertheless been registered as a world heritage of humanity and was the subject of an exhibition at the Louvre museum in 2010. The kingdom of Kush (3rd century BC -4th century AD) borrowed cultural elements from Pharaonic Egypt, ancient Greece and ancient Rome, but added African ones.

Since April 15, the war between the armed forces and the DTY has claimed the lives of at least 13,000 people, according to the — very conservative — estimate of the non-governmental organization ACLED, and has turned more than seven million Sudanese into internally displaced persons and refugees. , according to UN calculations.