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A series of attacks by Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) near the western border with Chad have razed multiple villages and displaced thousands of people, according to two survivors and the United Nations.
The RSF has been at war with the Sudanese army since April 2023, and has been accused by the UN of committing repeated massacres against Darfur’s non-Arab ethnic groups, including the Zaghawa who inhabit the western villages of North Darfur state.
According to the UN’s migration agency, more than 3,500 people were displaced on Friday from one village alone, Wadi Fungo in the Um Baru locality of North Darfur.
“They sent artillery through homes, they burned to the ground and people died on the street with no one to bury them,” said Issa Ibrahim who had to evacuate his wife and children across the border into Chad.
“We passed by two villages, Oruwa and Ana Baji, that were burned entirely. Bodies lay on the ground.”
Mohamed Adam, a 43-year-old resident of the village Qarboura, said two of his brothers were killed in the attacks, where fighters “burned down homes and killed everyone who couldn’t run away”.
Last year, the RSF seized the army’s last Darfur stronghold of El-Fasher in an assault a UN inquiry said bore the “hallmarks of genocide”, mainly targeting the city’s Zaghawa population.
The paramilitary group has since pushed west, attacking enclaves controlled by the Joint Forces, a coalition of army-allied armed groups whose leaders and fighters are also predominantly Zaghawa.
Since the war broke out, the UN, rights groups and survivors have repeatedly reported RSF war crimes including besieging and razing displacement camps, systematic sexual violence and ethnic massacres.
UN warns children are bearing the brunt of the fighting
In a separate report, the UN also said that the paramilitary group has killed or injured at least 330 children in the first six months of 2026, the United Nations’ children’s agency said on Monday.
The figures include more than 200 children killed and at least 100 maimed, mostly in the Kordofan and Darfur regions, where the worst of the RSF atrocities have been committed.
Children “are being killed and injured in their homes, on the roads, in markets, and while attempting to access essential services such as education and healthcare”, said Sheldon Yett, UNICEF’s Sudan chief.
Since April 2023, the war between the former allied forces has killed tens of thousands, with aid workers estimating that more than 200,000 people have been killed.
Across Sudan, five million children are internally displaced, according to UN figures. Millions are going hungry, including over 825,000 children under five suffering from severe acute malnutrition.
Additional sources • AFP