KHARTOUM (Reuters) – The deputy head of Sudan’s sovereign council led a mission to the city of Nyala in South Darfur on Thursday to assess the security situation following another spate of violence there, the council said.
At least 10 people were killed, 25 injured and several villages burnt in the violence in Beleil, an area outside Nyala, the United Nations said in a statement earlier this week.
Some 16,200 people were displaced by the latest clashes, many of them returnees who had fled war in Darfur in the early 2000s, the U.N. statement said.
General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo’s delegation included representatives of the army, the police, state intelligence and signatories of an October 2020 peace deal between the government and rebel groups it had fought in the Darfur conflict
The mission is similar to a trip Dagalo made to West Darfur earlier this year, the council statement said.
The Nyala state government has blamed the latest clashes on an attack by nomads which it said had then spurred wider fighting. It has imposed a state of emergency in the area and sent in joint forces including soldiers from the army and Dagalo’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.
Violence in the heavily-weaponized region has surged in recent years, spurred on by the 2020 peace deal which Dagalo helped to broker, analysts say.
Separately, on Wednesday and Thursday at least eight people were killed and 11 injured in attacks in Central Darfur, according to a group representing internally displaced people.
(Reporting by Nafisa Eltahir and Khalid Abdelaziz; Editing by Gareth Jones)
