Twenty-seven people, four of them children, were killed in attacks on the villages of Qardud and Abu Hamama in South Kordofan, according to the Sudan Doctors Network, reported by Al Jazeera.
The group attributes the attacks to the SPLM-N, a rebel movement it describes as aligned with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, and says the victims were civilians from the Otoro tribe. It said that targeting unarmed civilians on ethnic grounds constitutes a "clear violation of international humanitarian law".
Where this account comes from
A doctors' network is a credible source on casualties, because its members treat the wounded and receive the dead. It is a less independent source on attribution, since identifying which armed group carried out an attack is not a medical judgment.
We are reporting both parts as the network's account, and we have no response from the SPLM-N, which the source does not contain. That matters because an allegation of ethnically targeted killing is among the gravest that can be made.
Why the Nuba Mountains
The Otoro are a minority in the Nuba Mountains, and the report describes earlier clashes this year between SPLM-N forces and the tribe. The network warned the situation risks widening into broader ethnic conflict.
That warning is the reason to publish a story about two villages. Sudan's war has been fought largely between the army and the RSF, and a local dispute drawn along ethnic lines in the Nuba Mountains is how such wars extend into places that had held.
Residents are fleeing toward Abu Hitan and Kadugli, which is the ordinary consequence and the one that fills camps.
The scale behind it
Sudan's civil war, which began in April 2023, has killed at least 59,000 people and displaced 14 million. Two thirds of the population needs humanitarian assistance. We have followed Kordofan through the siege of El Obeid and the UN's count of 200,000 newly displaced.
What we could not establish
We could not establish the date of the attacks, whether the SPLM-N has responded, how many people have fled, or any independent confirmation of the toll or the attribution. We verified this account from a single publication, and every claim in it is the Sudan Doctors Network's.
