GENEVA: Drone strikes killed nearly 100 civilians and injured many more in Sudan’s conflict-torn Kordofan region in just over two weeks, the UN rights chief said Monday.
“In a period of just over two weeks to February 6, based on documentation by my office, some 90 civilians were killed and 142 injured in drone strikes,” Volker Turk told the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.
He said the strikes, which were carried out by both the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and Sudan’s regular army, “struck a World Food Programme convoy, markets, health facilities and residential neighborhoods in South and North Kordofan.”
Turk also said the atrocities unleashed on El-Fasher in Sudan’s Darfur region last October were a “preventable human rights catastrophe."
He warned that they now risked being repeated in the neighboring Kordofan region.
“My office sounded the alarm about the risk of mass atrocities in the besieged city of El-Fasher for more than a year ... but our warnings were ignored,” he said.
He added that he was now “extremely concerned that these violations and abuses may be repeated in the Kordofan region.”