Sudanese paramilitaries have killed more than 200 people including women and children in a three-day assault on villages in the country’s south, a lawyer group monitoring the war said Tuesday.
The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), locked in a nearly two-year war with the regular army, “attacked unarmed civilians in areas with no military presence” in Al-Kadaris and Al-Khelwat villages in White Nile state, according to Emergency Lawyers, which documents rights abuses.
It added that the RSF carried out “executions, kidnappings, enforced disappearances and property looting” during the assault since Saturday, which has also left hundreds injured or missing.
According to the lawyer group, some residents were shot at while attempting to flee across the Nile River.
Some have drowned as a result, the lawyers said, calling the assault on villagers an act of “genocide”.
Since April 2023, Sudan has been engulfed in a brutal conflict between the forces of army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.
Both sides have been accused of abuses and war crimes.
The war has killed tens of thousands, displaced over 12 million and created what the International Rescue Committee has called the “biggest humanitarian crisis ever recorded”.