Latest Sudan Attacks are Largest Offensive Since 2011

Institute on Religion and Democracy Press Release
March 6, 2015
Contact: Jeff Walton office: 202-682-4131, cell: 202-413-5639, e-mail: [email protected]

“The slaughter of Christians and other minority communities by ISIS has awakened many Christians to persecution of the global Church. Sudan’s Christians and other marginalized peoples are also under attack. For decades they have been starved, enslaved, and killed. Churches, schools, and hospitals bombed regularly by the Islamist government.”
-Faith J. H. McDonnell, IRD Religious Liberty Program Director

Washington, DC—Sudan’s Khartoum-based regime has ramped up its attacks on the people of the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile State.

The journalists of Nuba Reports chronicle bombings that continually have been taking place since June 2011. According to the latest count, 3740 bombs have been dropped on civilians in the Nuba Mountains since April 2012. Nuba Reports journalist Yassin Hassan writes that this new ramping up by the Sudanese government is “the largest offensive since the new stage of Sudan’s civil war started in 2011.”

Sudan’s Air Force has been accused of a number of atrocities this year:

-On January 7, Albanin Butrus, age 7, died from shrapnel that ripped through his body after a fighter jet attacked his village Abu Layla in South Kordofan.
-On February 3, a bomb hit a foxhole in Um Dorian County where nine children were sleeping. A sixteen year-old girl was killed immediately. The explosion lit a nearby house on fire which fell on the group of children. Two were killed.
–Morningstar News reports that on February 6, Sudan’s bombing of another civilian area killed Naheed Saeed Komi, 25, who was nine months pregnant. Another girl from the same church, Nour Kalowas, was also killed.
-On January 20, the Sudan Air Force bombed the only functioning hospital in the Nuba Mountains, run by Doctors Without Borders in Frandala. Two bombs hit the compound. Thankfully, only one patient and one staff member were injured.

IRD Religious Liberty Program Director Faith J. H. McDonnell commented:

“At IRD just this week we received a tragic report from our friend and colleague, a priest in the Diocese of Kadugli and Nuba Mountains of the Episcopal Church of South Sudan and Sudan. His cousin had just lost five of his children when a plane bombed their village of Sharf-Jamus, Acheron. The man and his remaining child were also seriously injured. Another family in the same neighborhood lost 2 children.

“Through the usual moral equivalence, many of the world’s leaders and others think that ‘both sides’ need to ‘stop fighting.’ If the SPLA-N stopped fighting, the forces of Khartoum would wipe out the men, women, and children of the Nuba Mountains.

“Sudan’s government acts with impunity. The weak response of the U.S. government and the world community to its genocidal actions have emboldened it into believing that no one cares enough to stop them.

“The slaughter of Christians and other minority communities by ISIS has awakened many Christians to persecution of the global Church. Sudan’s Christians and other marginalized peoples are also under attack. For decades they have been starved, enslaved, and killed. Churches, schools, and hospitals bombed regularly by the Islamist government.”

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