Sudan's Darfur Deadly Landslide

"Initial information indicates the death of all village residents, estimated at more than 1,000 individuals, with only one survivor."

"[The landslide is] massive and devastating." 

"This is beyond our capacity. Masses of mud fell onto the village. Our humanitarian teams and local residents are trying to retrieve the bodies, but the scale of the disaster is far greater than the resources available to us."

Abdulwahid al-Nur, leader, Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM) faction 

 

"We do not have helicopters, everything goes in vehicles on very bumpy roads."

"It takes time and it is the rainy season — sometimes we have to wait hours, maybe a day or two to cross a valley... bringing in trucks with commodities will be a challenge." 

Antoine Gérard, the UN's deputy humanitarian co-ordinator for Sudan  

Aftermath of earthquake in Western Sudan  Credit: Sudan Liberation Movement/Army/AFP via Getty

 

Sudan has been in the throes of a deadly civil war for a number of years. The conflict sees the Sudanese military warring with the rival Rapid Support Forces (RSF), once an ally of the government's military. During the Darfur conflict years earlier, government forces and the-then Arab Muslim Janjaweed horsemen raided black Darfurian farming villages, used helicopter gunships on the villagers, driving them from their homes and into nearby forests. Thousands were killed; an estimated 150,000 Darfurians lost their lives in the brutal war which displaced 12 million people. The Janjaweed represented herders, the Darfurians pastoralist farmers.

 

On Tuesday, more misfortune for Sudan's Darfur region when a landslide devastated an entire community, burying a town that held 1,000 people The village of Tarasin in the Jebel Marra range, under control of the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement Army saw a deluge of heavy rain triggering the disaster.

 

Sudan was urged by the African Union to "silence the guns" and in the process permit aid delivery to the deadly landslide's victims. "In these painful circumstances the chairperson of the Commission ... calls on all Sudanese stakeholders to silence the guns and unite in facilitating the swift and effective delivery of emergency humanitarian assistance to those in need", the bloc stated. 

 

Debris-covered ground in the wake of the deadly landslide. Credit: Sudan Liberation Movement/Army/AFP via Getty

 

 On its website, the SLM published images showing huge sections of a mountainside collapsed, the village buried under thick muck and uprooted trees. Footage revealed people standing on jagged rocks, searching for people buried under the mud. Parts of the Jebel Marra range is controlled by the SLM where the conflict has not penetrated, while hundreds of thousands of people fled there, to escape the civil war violence into SLM-held territory.

 

The geological area is that of a rugged volcanic range that stretches roughly 150 kilometres south-west of North Darfur's state capital El-Fasher, itself under fire, besieged for more than a year, as the RSF strains to capture it. An area particularly susceptible to landslides, in particular during the August rainy season, peaking at this time. 

 

Both factions in the power struggle, between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan where the internationally recognized government is based in Port Sudan, and his former deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagio, although rivals, have responded to the disaster that struck Sunday. Burhan's Transitional Sovereignty Council pledged to mobilize all available resources in support of those affected in the region by the landslide.  

"Initial information indicates the death of all the villagers, estimated at more than a thousand people, and only one person survived."

"[The entire area was] completely leveled to the ground [in the landslide]."

"We therefore appeal to the United Nations, regional and international organizations, and the living human conscience to help us recover the bodies of the dead from under the soil, whose number is estimated at more than a thousand people, men, women and children."

SLM statement