Mohnd Awad/EPA
Conflicts in Sudan
“Horrible reports” of executions, beheadings, torture and arbitrary arrests carried out by Sudanese soldiers and other allied countries. EU calls: put an “end to the culture of impunity”.
The European Union called on Wednesday for the atrocities committed over the weekend by the Sudanese army in Wad Madani, south of Khartoum, to be investigated and documented to “end the culture of impunity”.
A spokesperson for the European External Action Service (EEAS) expressed, in a post on social media, the EU’s dismay at the “horrible stories” of reprisals against the Kanabi (an agricultural community) in villages such as Kombo Tayba, in Wad Madani, capital of the State of Al-Jazira, controlled by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
According to several sources, Sudanese soldiers and soldiers from other allied countries executed, beheaded, tortured and arbitrarily detained dozens of people during the ethnic cleansing operations that followed the seizure of the strategic city last weekend.
“All atrocities must be investigated independently, their perpetrators brought to justice and the culture of impunity must be put an end,” said the EEAS spokesperson.
The Sudanese organization Emergency Lawyers denounced, on Tuesday, the “shocking and horrible scenes” and stated that these “reflect a level of unprecedented sadism and criminality“, qualifying them as “war crimes and crimes against humanity”.
“Ethnic cleansing”
The Kanabi community rights group accused a group led by Abu Aqla Kaykal, who played a key role in the army offensive in Al-Jazira, of committing a “massacre“.
The United States of America envoy to Sudan, Tom Perriello, described the attacks as “terrible“. The army “and the militias linked to it must act immediately to investigate and hold accountable those who committed such horrors”, he wrote in X.
However, the Sudanese armed forces (SAF) rejected the accusations, promised to punish those responsible and reaffirmed their “respect for international law”.
For their part, the RSF stated that it was “ethnic cleansing crimes” and declared that hundreds of people died in the course of “these brutal campaigns”.
Also Monday at least 120 people were killed in a bombing raid by SAF fighters on an RSF-controlled area in the Ombada municipality, west of Khartoum.
The objective is to reconquer Khartoum
The army’s immediate objective is to recapture Khartoum from the paramilitaries, which is why it launched an offensive to surround the city from neighboring Khartoum North and Omdurman, located between Ombada and the capital.
Much of Omdurman is under army control, while paramilitaries maintain a large presence in both Khartoum and Khartoum North.
Both the army and paramilitaries have been accused of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity during the war in Sudan, where tens of thousands of people were killed and more than 14 million others were forced to flee their homes inside and outside the country due to violence.
Sudan faces one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. There are so many deaths in the civil war that they can no longer be counted. The day before the famine report came out, the country exited the famine monitoring system, possibly fearing what the results would say.
