CAIRO – A deadly attack on unarmed civilian communities in Sudan has drawn international condemnation after a local humanitarian monitoring group documented the deaths of 27 people, including multiple elderly residents, during one of Islam’s most sacred annual holidays. The Sudan Doctors Network, a non-partisan group that tracks violent incidents across the conflict-torn nation, issued a statement Friday blaming fighters aligned with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) for the Thursday assaults on multiple small villages in the al-Murrah region. This area sits west of Barah town in North Kordofan, one of the war’s most active frontlines, and has been free of any organized military presence from the opposing Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).
The attack unfolded on the second day of Eid al-Adha, the “Feast of Sacrifice” celebrated by more than 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide, marking a violent interruption to a holiday focused on peace, community, and ritual. The monitoring group emphasized that the deliberate targeting of undefended civilian villages and the mass killing of residents in this brutal manner represents a clear, unambiguous violation of international humanitarian law. It added that the assault has further exacerbated the catastrophic humanitarian conditions that millions of Sudanese civilians have already endured throughout the 15-month full-scale conflict between the SAF and RSF.
Tensions between Sudan’s national army and the RSF, which built their power and influence during decades of former authoritarian rule, boiled over into open war in April 2023. What began as clashes in the capital Khartoum quickly spread across the country, with the Kordofan region emerging as one of the conflict’s central battlefields. Fighting across the area has intensified in recent months, with both sides deploying drone technology to strike targets deep behind enemy lines. The RSF and its allied militias currently control most of Sudan’s western Darfur region, as well as large swathes of Kordofan along the border with South Sudan – both resource-rich territories holding extensive untapped oil reserves and profitable gold mines. Control of Barah, a strategic population center in North Kordofan, has been a repeated point of bloody clashes between the two warring factions for months.
This latest attack comes on the heels of a string of mass casualty incidents across Sudan that have underscored the growing risk to civilians caught in the crossfire. Earlier this month, violent clashes between fighters aligned with the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North and the Otoro tribe in South Kordofan left more than 61 people dead, including nine children. Just one week prior, a drone strike on a crowded open-air market in central Sudan killed 28 civilians and wounded dozens more.
To date, the ongoing Sudanese conflict has officially been linked to at least 59,000 confirmed deaths, a toll human rights organizations and aid groups warn is a drastic undercount. More than 13 million Sudanese have been displaced from their homes, with roughly half forced to flee across international borders, and large swathes of the country are already facing catastrophic famine conditions. United Nations data indicates that more than 30 million Sudanese – nearly two-thirds of the country’s total population – require urgent life-saving humanitarian assistance. Both the SAF and RSF have been repeatedly accused by the United Nations and independent global human rights groups of committing widespread war crimes and atrocities against civilian populations, including systematic ethnic cleansing, extrajudicial executions, and widespread sexual violence used as a weapon of war. Aid access to most active conflict zones across Sudan’s vast territory remains severely restricted, meaning the true human cost of the conflict will likely remain unknown for years.