KHARTOUM: Heavy rains have triggered building collapses that have killed nine people in northern Sudan, as the country reels from almost 16 months of fighting between rival security forces, a medic told AFP Tuesday.
“Nine people have died as a result of their houses collapsing,” said an employee at a hospital in Abu Hamad, a small town in Sudan’s Nile state, some 400 kilometers (nearly 250 miles) north of Khartoum.
“Many injured people continue to arrive at the hospital,” the source added.
Each year in August, peak flow on the Nile is accompanied by heavy rains, destroying homes, wrecking infrastructure and claiming lives, both directly and indirectly through water-borne diseases.
The impact is expected to be worse this year after more than a year of fighting that has pushed millions of displaced people into flood zones.
“Heavy rains caused most of the houses to collapse and all the shops in the market collapsed,” a witness in Abu Hamad told AFP by telephone.
Last week, a flash flood caused the deaths of five people in Port Sudan, on the Red Sea coast.
Aid groups have repeatedly warned that humanitarian access, already hampered by the war, will be made near-impossible in some areas as the rainy season hits.
Sudan faces what the United Nations has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in recent memory, as fighting between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces shows no sign of abating.
Some 10.5 million people have been forced from their homes, while the main battlegrounds teeter on the brink of all-out famine.
The war has already pushed the nearly half a million residents of the Zamzam camp outside the besieged Darfur city of El-Fasher into famine, a UN-backed assessment said last week.
Heavy rains kill nine in war-torn Sudan
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Heavy rains kill nine in war-torn Sudan
- “Nine people have died as a result of their houses collapsing,” said an employee at a hospital in Abu Hamad, a small town in Sudan’s Nile state
- The impact is expected to be worse this year after more than a year of fighting that has pushed millions of displaced people into flood zones
Syria’s Sharaa grants Kurdish Syrians citizenship, language rights for first time, SANA says
- The decree for the first time grants Kurdish Syrians rights, including recognition of Kurdish identity as part of Syria’s national fabric
- It designates Kurdish as a national language alongside Arabic and allows schools to teach it
DAMASCUS: Syria’s President Ahmed Al-Sharaa issued a decree affirming the rights of the Kurdish Syrians, formally recognizing their language and restoring citizenship to all Kurdish Syrians, state news agency SANA reported on Friday.
Sharaa’s decree came after fierce clashes that broke out last week in the northern city of Aleppo, leaving at least 23 people dead, according to Syria’s health ministry, and forced more than 150,000 to flee the two Kurdish-run pockets of the city.
The clashes ended after Kurdish fighters withdrew.
The violence in Aleppo has deepened one of the main faultlines in Syria, where Al-Sharaa’s promise to unify the country under one leadership after 14 years of war has faced resistance from Kurdish forces wary of his Islamist-led government.
The decree for the first time grants Kurdish Syrians rights, including recognition of Kurdish identity as part of Syria’s national fabric. It designates Kurdish as a national language alongside Arabic and allows schools to teach it.
It also abolishes measures dating to a 1962 census in Hasaka province that stripped many Kurds of Syrian nationality, granting citizenship to all affected residents, including those previously registered as stateless.
The decree declares Nowruz, the spring and new year festival, a paid national holiday. It bans ethnic or linguistic discrimination, requires state institutions to adopt inclusive national messaging and sets penalties for incitement to ethnic strife.
The Syrian government and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), that controls the country’s northeast, have engaged in months of talks last year to integrate Kurdish-run military and civilian bodies into Syrian state institutions by the end of 2025, but there has been little progress.
