Hundreds of Sudanese residents flee amid paramilitary attacks and violence erupting in the western city of Nyala and many other regions in the state of South Darfur on Sunday.
Witnesses said the latest development threatens to engulf the region in Sudan's protracted war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by rival generals.
Sudan Fighting Intensifies
The conflict in the country has resulted in daily occurrences of conflict between the two sides and has ravaged the streets of the capital of Khartoum. The situation also led to the revival of ethnically targeted attacks in West Darfur and the displacement of more than 4 million people within the nation and across its borders into Chad, Egypt, South Sudan, and other countries.
The Sudanese army and the RSF have periodically engaged against each other in Nyala, which is the second biggest city in Sudan and is considered a strategic hub for the fragile Darfur region, as per the South China Morning Post.
On Sunday, witnesses said that RSF paramilitaries attacked Nyala using dozens of military vehicles and noted that hundreds of residents fled because of intense artillery fire.
They also said that the latest fighting in the region lasted three days, with both sides using artillery to fire into residential neighborhoods. The conflict has caused damage to electricity, water, and telecom networks.
The Darfur Bar Association, a national human rights monitor, said that at least eight people were killed on Saturday. Witnesses also said that in the last few days, the fighting in the region had extended 100 kilometers to the west of Nyala, in the Kubum area, resulting in dozens of deaths.
The bar association also noted that Arab tribe members equipped with RSF vehicles attacked the area, burning down the market while raiding the police station. The situation comes as several Arab tribes have pledged their allegiance to the RSF, according to Alarabiya.
A Dangerous Conflict
In a statement, the association called on all elements not to get dragged into the conflict, aiming to take power in the country's center. On Friday, Meta, the parent company of social media platform Facebook, removed official pages that belonged to the RSF for allegedly violating its "dangerous organizations and individuals policy."
The widespread fighting in the area threatens to bring Darfur back to the bloody attacks in the early 2000s. It was a time when "Janjaweed" militias, from which the RSF formed, assisted in helping the country's army crush a rebellion led by mainly non-Arab groups.
The United Nations also warned of sexual violence committed in Sudan on a "sickening scale." Officials from the global organization said that the fighting in the region has reopened old wounds of ethnic tension.
Senior UN aid official Edem Wosornu said that the alarming accounts of sexual violence reported by people who fled to Port Sudan were only a fraction of the ones being repeated from conflict hotspots across the nation, said Reuters.
