Typical dwellings in the Nuba Mountains. csi
The bombing on November 29 targeted Kumo, a village close to the town of Kauda in the Nuba Mountains region that borders South Sudan. The Nuba Mountains and the Blue Nile region are largely under the control of the SPLA-N rebel group. SPLA-N has aligned itself with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which have been fighting the government for more than two years.
According to local partners of Christian Solidarity International (CSI), the Sudanese military carried out the drone strikes which appeared to be aimed at the school and a nearby medical clinic. The attack claimed the lives of 48 civilians, mostly children.
“Compassion and Sustainable Development Africa condemns in the strongest possible terms this inhumane evil practice of SAF who were supposed to protect these young children at school,” CSI’s partners wrote.
“This was not a military target, nor an active combat zone… the strike deliberately targeted non-combatants,” the SPLA-N said in a statement reported by The Telegraph. The SPLA_N noted that the Sudanese Army has “a long history of aerial assaults on civilians in the Nuba Mountains, the Blue Nile, and Darfur.”
Deadliest attack in decades
Eyewitnesses said the school was hit first, drawing people to the site, before a second strike followed minutes later, The Telegraph reported.
Images shared with CSI that were taken in the aftermath of the massacre showed the bodies of the dead littering the ground.
CSI’s partners wrote that “these kinds of massacres have been happen[ing] in the Nuba Mountains for more than three decades now.”
The Nuba mountains are home to a mixed Muslim-Christian population, which has been ruled by a de facto secular government for decades, in contrast to the Islamist regimes that have ruled the rest of Sudan since the 1980s. Amidst Sudan’s second civil war in the 1990s, the Sudanese government waged a genocidal campaign against the Nuba people.
After South Sudan peacefully seceded from Sudan in 2011, the Sudanese government launched an air war against the Nuba Mountains, after the SPLA-N refused to submit to its rule.
The civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces broke out in April 2023. In February of this year, SPLA-N joined forces with the RSF to attack government troops, and fighting has intensified in the Blue Nile region since September.
Until now, the Nuba Mountains has been largely spared the violence of Sudan’s new civil war. The massacre in Kumo suggests that may be changing.
After seizing control of El Fasher in late October, the RSF now exerts control over the western Sudanese state of Darfur and is extending its push eastwards, adding to the numbers of people displaced.
Millions displaced by war
Sudan’s civil war has driven millions from their homes. In the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile regions, hundreds of thousands of IDPs have taken shelter – including people returning home to these regions from the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, as well as other Sudanese people fleeing the fighting. In addition to those fleeing fighting, the number of displaced includes Nuba people returning to the two regions from the Sudanese capital, Khartoum.
Crammed together in camps holding tens of thousands, people are suffering from hunger and dying from treatable diseases. Cholera and measles are rife.
Against this backdrop, CSI has distributed food and emergency aid to 900 households in three camps in Thobo and Ingpung counties in the Nuba Mountains, and 646 households in Jabarona camp in Blue Nile. In total 1,546 households with 9,276 people have been reached.
