2023-07-11 06:38:16
Dozens of people were killed and injured in the attack in late May by paramilitaries from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and Arab tribesmen in the town of Misterei in Darfur, “almost completely burnt down”, HRW said on Tuesday, which urges the ICC to investigate these “war crimes”.
“The FSR and Arab tribes (allied to the FSR, editor’s note) summarily executed at least 28 people of the Massalit ethnic group, and killed and injured dozens of civilians on May 28 in the state of West Darfur”, reports the human rights NGO Human Rights Watch in this investigative report published on Tuesday and entitled “Sudan: a city of Darfur annihilated”.
According to the NGO, “several thousand” attackers, who arrived at dawn on “pick-ups, motorcycles and on horseback”, “surrounded” the town of 46,000 inhabitants and then clashed with armed Massalit civilians from a local vigilante group. Also according to HRW, the FSR and heavily armed Arab militias then “killed men in their homes, in the streets (…) and fired on fleeing residents, killing and wounding women, and wounding children ” .
Civilians were hunted down in schools and mosques where they had taken refuge. The attackers went to schools at least eight times in search of men whom they summarily executed, according to testimonies.
Two women who took refuge in a school said the assailants executed three men and riddled the classroom with bullets, seriously injuring three women and two children, according to HRW. The assailants looted the town on a large scale and “almost burned it down” as evidenced by satellite images, reports HRW, prompting the exodus of “thousands of people” to neighboring Chad.
“Many of these violations amount to war crimes,” says the NGO, which urges the International Criminal Court – which is already investigating crimes committed in Darfur from the early 2000s – to investigate the attack. of Misterei. Misterei is mainly populated by Massalit, one of the large non-Arab ethnic groups of Darfur, a region in western Sudan which had already been scarred by a civil war in the 2000s and where Arab fighters have long reigned terror. . The ethnic divide has widened further in this region since the beginning, in the spring, of a war between the FSR of General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo and the army, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane.
On the evening of May 28, survivors of the Misterei attack “buried the bodies of at least 59 people, most of them men, in mass graves”, according to the testimonies collected. Local officials told HRW that at least 97 people were killed, including members of the local vigilante group.
For its part, HRW was able to establish that “at least 40 civilians had been killed”, including a woman, and at least 14 civilians injured, including 5 women and 4 children. “Since this conflict erupted in Sudan in April, some of the worst atrocities have been perpetrated in West Darfur,” said HRW researcher Jean-Baptiste Gallopin. “These mass killings and the total destruction of Misterei prove the need for a stronger international response to this spreading conflict.”
To carry out this investigation, HRW researchers collected testimonies from 29 survivors of the attack who had fled to Chad in June. The NGO also spoke to 37 refugees from other parts of West Darfur who described the same violations, and analyzed satellite images and fire detection data. HRW urges warring parties in Sudan to “stop attacking civilians” and allow “safe humanitarian access”.
Dozens of people were killed and injured in the attack in late May by paramilitaries from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and Arab tribesmen in the town of Misterei in Darfur, “almost completely burnt down”, HRW said on Tuesday, which urges the ICC to investigate these “war crimes”.
“The FSR and Arab tribes (allied to…
1689058083
#War #crimes #attack #town #Darfur
