- The entire village buried in Jebel Marra.
- Only a survivor withdrew from disaster.
- SLM appeals to urgent UN help.
Khartoum: A massive landslide in Sudan’s western Darfur region has flattened a whole mountain village and killed more than 1,000 people, said a rebel group, leaving only one survivor.
The disaster hit Sunday after days of heavy rain and destroyed the village of Tarasin in the Jebel Marra area, Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM), led by Abdulwahid al-Nur, said in a statement.
“Initial information indicates death for all the village residents, estimated at more than 1,000 individuals, with only one survivor,” the group said, called the landslide “massive and devastating.”
The group appealed to the United Nations and other aid organizations for helping to regain the dead, still buried under mud and waste.
Pictures SLM, published on social media, seemed to show huge sections of the hillside collapsed and buried the village under thick mud, upset trees and crushed beams.
Sudan is involved in a bloody war between the army and the paramilitary rapid support forces (RSF), which has thrown the country into one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
SLM controls parts of the Jebel Marra series and has mostly stayed out of the conflict, but hundreds of thousands of people have fled into SLM-held territory to escape the violence.
Jebel Marra is a robust volcanic range that extends about 160 kilometers southwest of North Darfur’s besieged capital El-Fasher, which RSF pushes to catch after besieged it for more than a year.
The area is prone to landslide, especially in the rainy season that peaks in August. A landslide in 2018 in nearby Toukoli killed at least 20 people.
‘Tragedy’
Darfur’s army-adapted governor, Minni Minnawi, called the landslide a “humanitarian tragedy that goes beyond the borders of the region.”
“We appeal to international humanitarian organizations about urgently intervening and providing support and help at this critical moment, because the tragedy is greater than what our people can carry alone,” he said in a statement.
Much of Darfur – including the area where the landslide took place – remains largely inaccessible to international aid organizations due to the ongoing matches, which severely limits the delivery of urgent humanitarian assistance.
The disaster also comes in Sudan’s rainy season, often making mountain roads and remote areas unacceptable.
The relentless rainfall complicates further efforts from humanitarian organizations to gain access to the distressed, especially in conflict-affected regions such as Darfur, where infrastructure is already fragile or non-existent.
Since April 2023, Sudan has been ravaged by a war that broke out with a power struggle between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.
In a number of offensives, Burhan’s strengths Central Sudan this year, which left RSF with control over most of Darfur-where it has conquered everyone except a state capital, electric-fasher and parts of southern chordophane.
The matches have killed tens of thousands and displaced millions, including about four million from the capital alone.
The war has decimated the infrastructure of the Northeast African country and created what the UN describes as the world’s largest shift and hunger crises.
About 10 million people are currently displaced in Sudan, while another four million have fled to neighboring countries, according to the UN.
