Twenty-one people were killed on Sunday, September 8, in shootings attributed to paramilitaries in a market in Sennar, in southeastern Sudan. The Sudanese Medical Network also reported that more than 70 people were wounded in this attack, which it attributed to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitaries under the orders of General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo, who are fighting against the army of General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhane.
Since April 2023, Sudan has been ravaged by a bloody conflict between the army and paramilitary forces. It has already caused tens of thousands of deaths and triggered one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.
Sennar state, which was already home to more than half a million displaced people before the fighting, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), connects central Sudan to the army-controlled southeast and where hundreds of thousands more displaced people have found refuge.
In August, a paramilitary attack left at least 80 dead in a town in this state, a medical source and witnesses reported.
Request for arms embargo rejected
UN Human Rights Council experts on Friday called for “deployment without delay” of a force “independent and impartial” protection of civilians in the country. They claimed that Sudanese belligerents had committed “an appalling series of human rights violations and international crimes, many of which qualify as crimes against humanity”. This recommendation by experts on the deployment of an independent force was ignored by Sudanese diplomacy, which denounced a “flagrant violation of his mandate” by the UN mission.
“Protection of civilians remains a top priority for the Sudanese government”The Foreign Ministry said, accusing the “Militias systematically attack civilians and civilian institutions”.
He estimated that “the paper” of the Human Rights Council should be “support the national process rather than trying to impose a different external mechanism”also rejecting the call for an arms embargo.
Sudan is living a “nightmare”
The war, which has displaced more than 10 million people, especially 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 stop the conflict and respond to the suffering caused”warned the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, on Sunday.
While visiting Port Sudan, he called “Let the world wake up and help get Sudan out of the nightmare it is living in”expressing alarm during a press conference of the “A large part of the health system almost collapsed”.
According to him, 70 to 80% of health infrastructure is not fully operational and the humanitarian sector, which had requested 2.7 billion dollars in aid (approximately 2.5 billion euros) for 14.7 million Sudanese in urgent need, collected less than half of it.
