At least 168 people were killed in violent clashes in Darfur on Sunday, the deadliest in the West Sudan province, which has been torn apart by decades of war, a non-governmental organization said.
The incidents began in Krink, 80 kilometers from El Jenaina, the capital of West Sudan, on Friday, the day eight people were killed, according to Adam Rigal, spokesman for the NGO General Coordination for Refugees and Displaced Persons in Darfur. .
“At least 168 people were killed (yesterday) Sunday and (another) 98 were injured,” Rigal said, adding that the tally was still provisional and could be even heavier.
A local leader of the Masalit tribe said he saw corpses in several villages in the Krink area. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has called on the authorities to ensure the safe transport of the injured to hospitals in the area.
According to the General Coordination, the violent incidents broke out when gunmen, members of Arab tribes, attacked villages of the African minority of Masalit, in retaliation for the death on Thursday of two members of their tribes.
Videos and photos uploaded to the Internet show columns of black smoke rising from houses and burned areas where traditional huts used to be. The authenticity of these images is impossible to verify independently.
Dozens of people have been killed and hundreds of homes set on fire, according to the United Nations, in a series of violent incidents in Darfur in recent months. Outbreaks appear to have been exacerbated by the security breach created by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s military coup in Khartoum in October.
Clashes between Arab farmers and African farmers over land, access to water and other resources had already claimed the lives of nearly 250 people from October to December in Darfur, according to a group of doctors, part of the pro-democracy movement in Sudan. .
In the vast region of western Sudan, a civil war has been raging since 2003 between the Arab regime and rebels, members of ethnic minorities who have denounced discrimination and marginalization.
The conflict left some 300,000 dead and about 2.5 million internally displaced people and refugees, according to UN estimates.
Sudan, where the thirty-year dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir ended in 2019, is sinking into a political and economic decline after the new military coup.
By the end of the year, the UN warns, 20 of Sudan’s 45 million will face food insecurity. And those most affected in the country, one of the poorest in the world, will be the more than 3.3 million internally displaced, who live almost entirely in camps in Darfur.
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