Hundreds of Sudanese villagers were killed when a landslide engulfed their village in Darfur, a region already stricken by famine and war, according to officials and a local rebel group that issued an urgent appeal for international help.
The landslide happened Sunday after days of heavy rain and flattened the village of Tarsin in the remote Marra mountains, the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army said in a statement.
The rebel group said that as many as 1,000 people had been killed in the disaster, with just a single survivor in the village. The toll was based on estimates of the village population.
The top United Nations official in Sudan, Luca Renda, said in a statement that 300 to 1,000 people may have died. Sudan’s government and aid workers scrambling to reach the affected area offered similar estimates.
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“This is a nightmare,” Abdul Wahid al-Nur, the leader of the rebel group, said by phone from Nairobi, Kenya, on Tuesday.
He asked the UN and aid groups to send heavy machinery and rescue workers, saying, “We need to move thousands of tonnes of rock and earth.
“Our biggest problem is that nobody is coming to help. This is beyond our capability.”
The landslide was the latest calamity to befall a region already ravaged by Sudan’s two-year civil war and the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.
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“It’s a natural disaster in the middle of a war,” said Mathilde Vu of the Norwegian Refugee Council, which works in the region. “It’s the worst possible combination.”
Efforts to reach Tarsin were being hampered by the village’s remoteness and continuing heavy rains, she said.
The area has no phone networks, few roads and little state presence. Local responders said Tarsin could only be reached by donkey or a three-hour trek, Vu added.
The area has seen landslides before, most notably in 2018 when dozens of people were killed in the village of Tarba, according to Mr al-Nur. But that was a modest crisis compared with the disaster that struck Sunday night.
Sudan’s military chief, Gen Abdel-Fattah Burhan, said in a statement that hundreds of people had been killed and that the government he leads was mobilising “all possible resources” to support those affected.
But his shaky writ does not extend to most of Darfur, a region that has suffered greatly since April 2023, when clashes between the military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) exploded into a catastrophic civil war.
A famine that was declared last year in Zamzam camp, about 110km northeast of Tarsin, has since spread across Sudan. About 25 million people in Sudan now need urgent food aid, according to the UN, while at least 14 million have been forced from their homes.
Unusually, Mr al-Nur’s group has remained neutral in the fight, despite being surrounded on all sides by the Rapid Support Forces. The Sudan Liberation Movement/Army’s stronghold of the Marra mountains, a range of volcanic peaks that rise to about 3,000 metres, has become a haven for civilians fleeing other areas.
But only a trickle of help has reached them, since both Sudan’s military and the RSF have restricted aid flows amid the fighting, in which relief workers have also been killed and aid trucks looted.
Conditions are particularly dire in the town of Tawila, where the UN says at least 380,000 people have taken shelter in a makeshift camp. Nearly all have fled the besieged city of El Fasher, 50km away, and many have reported rapes or killing by fighters on the way, human-rights groups say.
In recent weeks, a cholera epidemic has gripped the town. The aid group Doctors Without Borders said it had treated 2,300 people for cholera in July at a facility in Tawila that had just 130 beds. There were nearly 100,000 cases of cholera and at least 2,470 deaths across the country as of August 11, the aid group said.
Sudan’s meteorological authority had warned in its daily forecast that thunderstorms and heavy rainfall were expected in much of Darfur, as well in Blue Nile State, on Sunday.
It placed the area around the Marra mountains under a “severe” weather warning until Wednesday, cautioning that thunderstorms and heavy rain could trigger more flooding.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
