CAIRO (AP) — Days of tribal clashes in southern Sudan have killed at least 19 people and wounded dozens, the United Nations said Thursday, the latest flare-up to hit this African nation in recent months.
The violence in West Kordofan province erupted last week following a gunfight between the Misseriya and Nuba ethnic groups amid a land dispute near the town of Al Lagowa, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA.
On Tuesday, the state governor visited the town to talk to local residents in a bid to de-escalate the conflict before coming under artillery fire from a nearby mountainous area, OCHA said. There were no reports of casualties from the artillery fire.
In a statement published on Wednesday, the Sudanese Army accused the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North, a rebel group active in the Blue Nile and South Kordofan, of being behind the attack on Al Lagowa. The rebel group has not responded to the accusation.
The violence prompted around 36,500 people to flee Al Lagowa while many who remained sought shelter in the town’s army base, OCHA added. The area is currently inaccessible to humanitarian aid, the agency said.
The clashes are the latest in inter-communal violence across Sudan’s neglected peripheries. Fighting that broke out between two tribal groups in Sudan’s Blue Nile state in July had killed 149 people by early October. Over the past week, renewed clashes in Blue Nile killed 13 more people, OCHA said.
Sudan has been plugged into turmoil since a coup last October that upended the country’s brief democratic transition after three decades of autocratic rule by Omar al-Bashir. He was toppled in an April 2019 popular uprising, paving the way for a civilian-military power-sharing government.
Eisa El Dakar, a local journalist from West Kordofan, told The Associated Press last week that the conflict there is partially rooted in the two ethnic groups conflicting claims to local land, with the Misseriya being predominately a herding community and the Nuba mostly farmers. Much of Kordofan and other areas in southern Sudan have been rocked by chaos and conflict over the past decade.
Many analysts consider the rising violence a product of the power vacuum in the region, caused by the military coup last October. The violence has also further imperiled Sudan’s already struggling economy, compounded by fuel shortages caused, in part, by the war in Ukraine.
