Two days of fighting between Sudanese rivals have forced an estimated 10,000 families to flee a famine-hit displacement camp in the Darfur region, the UN migration agency said yesterday.
The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) last week stormed Zamzam camp, home to at least half a mn people, triggering clashes with the Sudanese army and allied militias, witnesses told AFP.
The International Organisation for Migration said the violence since February 11 had displaced 10,000 families from Zamzam, just south of North Darfur state capital El-Fasher.
The agency cautioned that its data covers only the first two days of the reported attack as its collection capacity had been reduced due to funding constraints. Beyond the camp, a further “1,544 households were displaced from various villages” near El-Fasher, the IOM said.
El-Fasher is the only state capital in the vast western region of Darfur that the RSF has not captured in its nearly two-year war with the Sudanese army.
With the military on the verge of retaking the capital Khartoum following a multi-front offensive on central Sudan, the paramilitaries have intensified attacks on El-Fasher in a bid to consolidate their hold on Darfur. But the RSF has not managed to take the city, its attacks successively repelled by the army-aligned Joint Forces but sending tens of thousands of people fleeing. Before the most recent attacks, there were already 1.7mn people displaced in North Darfur alone, with 2mn facing extreme food insecurity.
