KHARTOUM, SUDAN — The Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) said on Monday that a terrible landslide had wiped out a village in the Marra Mountains area of western Sudan, killing at least 1,000 people and leaving only one person alive.
The incident happened on August 31, after days of heavy rain in the area. Abdelwahid Mohamed Nour leads the gang that controls the area in the war-torn Darfur region. They said that the village was “completely levelled to the ground.”
The SLM/A has made an urgent request to the UN and other foreign humanitarian groups to help find the bodies, which include men, women, and children. Many of the victims were citizens who had fled the two-year civil war between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and sought safety in the Marra Mountains. This makes the tragedy even worse. The war has already forced millions of people to leave their homes, and more than half of the country’s population is now facing extreme starvation. Al-Fashir, the capital of North Darfur state, has been under siege, causing inhabitants to flee to more isolated and dangerous locations like the Marra Mountains, where resources are already short.
This terrible occurrence shows how bad the humanitarian situation is in Sudan, where natural disasters and armed conflict are coming together to make things much worse for the people living there.