Scores killed in Darfur tribal clashes
Fighting between rival tribes in Sudanese border region kill up to 94 people, weeks after a peace deal was signed.
Two days of fighting between rival tribes in Sudan’s Darfur region has killed up to 94 people, tribal leaders said.
Clashes between Arab Misseriya tribesmen and members of the rival Salamat tribe in South Darfur began on Friday, Ahmed al-Kheiri, a Misseriya leader, said.
“We lost eight of our men and killed 86 from the other side,” al-Kheiri said, accusing Salamat of attacking his tribe.
A Salamat leader, however, gave a lower toll.
“The Misseriya attacked our village and we resisted, losing 52 of our men,” the leader said, asking not to be named.
The latest fighting occurred in southwestern Darfur’s Umm Dukhun area, near the Chadian border.
Peace deal
On July 3 the two tribes signed a peace agreement under which they were to pay compensation to each other, and refugees would return.
The joint African Union-United Nations peacekeeping mission in Darfur (UNAMID) says inter-ethnic fighting has been the major source of violence in the region this year, leading to the displacement of an estimated 300,000 people in the first five months alone. That is more than in the previous two years combined.
In its latest Humanitarian Bulletin, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that about 12,000 people are believed to have fled into Umm Dukhun town from the surrounding area after the Misseriya-Salamat unrest began in April.
Prior to this year’s upsurge of violence there were already 1.4 million people in camps for people uprooted by Darfur’s conflict, which began a decade ago when rebels from black tribes rose against what they said was the domination of Sudan’s power and wealth by Arab elites.