Up to 15,000 dead in war-plagued Darfur town: UN

GENEVA

A single town in Sudan's war-ravaged Darfur region has seen 10,000 to 15,000 people killed since April, with paramilitaries allied with Arab militias potentially committing crimes against humanity there, according to a U.N. report on Jan. 22.

Fighting has raged since last spring between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan's troops and his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo's rebel paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), with El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur state, emerging as the nucleus of the brutal violence.

The conflict has claimed more than 13,000 lives, according to a conservative estimate by the ACLED analysis group, on which the United Nations Office for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) bases its assessment. Millions of people have been displaced.

But "according to intelligence sources, between 10,000-15,000 people were killed in El Geneina alone," according to a report by an expert panel mandated by the U.N. Security Council to monitor the enforcement of sanctions against Sudan.

The document, sent to Security Council members but not yet officially published, provides no overall death toll but describes in detail the "ethnically motivated" violence in El Geneina, which fell under RSF control in June.

"The attacks were planned, coordinated, and executed by RSF and their allied Arab militias," who "deliberately targeted civilian neighborhoods, [internally displaced persons] gathering sites and IDP camps, schools, mosques, and hospitals, while looting" homes, non-governmental organizations and U.N. compounds, the experts wrote.