#sudan

#sudan

Six United Nations peacekeepers from Bangladesh were killed and eight more were wounded in a drone attack on a UN base in Sudan on Saturday, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said. The drone strike hit a logistics camp of the UN Interim Security Force for Abyei (UNISFA) in Kadugli, the capital of South Kordofan state. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the "unjustifiable" attack and said that such attacks "may constitute war crimes under international law."

Following the coup that overthrew al-Bashir in 2019, a fragile civilian-military transitional arrangement failed to unite competing factions. Political instability, localised rebellions, and a simmering rivalry between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) the successor to the Popular Defence Forces, government-backed militia known as the Janjaweed who committed war crimes in Darfur in the early 2000s escalated into full-blown conflict.

Speaking in Bahrain on Sunday, Anwar Gargash, the UAE's senior diplomatic envoy, said the UAE and others had been wrong not to impose sanctions on the instigators of the 2021 coup jointly led by the RSF and the army that overthrew Sudan's transitional civilian government. We all made a mistake when the two generals who are fighting the civil war today overthrew the civilian government, Gargash said.

The rate of civilian deaths across Sudan has increased, the report says, with 3,384 civilians dying in the first six months of the year, a figure equalling 80 percent of the 4,238 civilian deaths throughout the whole of 2024. Sudan's conflict is a forgotten one, and I hope that my office's report puts the spotlight on this disastrous situation where atrocity crimes, including war crimes, are being committed, OHCHR chief Volker Turk said in a statement.

More than 1,500 civilians may have been massacred during an attack on Sudan's largest displacement camp in April, making it the second-biggest war crime of the conflict.