Rescue teams were struggling to reach a remote mountain village in Sudan’s Darfur region on Tuesday after a devastating landslide buried almost the entire community killing more than 1,000 people.
Heavy rain triggered the disaster on Sunday, flattening the village of Tarasin in the Jebel Marra range, the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM) faction which controls the area said in a statement, adding that there was only one survivor.
“Initial information indicates the death of all village residents, estimated at more than 1,000 individuals, with only one survivor,” the faction led by Abdulwahid al-Nur said, calling the landslide “massive and devastating”.
The group appealed to the United Nations and other aid organisations for help recovering the dead still buried under mud and debris.
“This is beyond our capacity,” Nur told AFP via a messaging app.
“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,” he said.
The African Union urged Sudan to “silence the guns” and allow aid delivery to victims of the deadly landslide.
“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 said in a statement.
Images the SLM published on its website appeared to show huge sections of the mountainside collapsed, burying the village under thick mud and uprooted trees.
Footage showed people standing on jagged rocks as they searched for those buried beneath the mud.
The SLM controls parts of the Jebel Marra range and has mostly stayed out of the conflict, but hundreds of thousands of people have fled into SLM-held territory to escape the violence.
Jebel Marra is a rugged volcanic range stretching about 160 kilometres (100 miles) southwest of North Darfur’s besieged state capital El-Fasher, which the RSF is pushing to capture after besieging it for more than a year.
The area is prone to landslides, particularly during the rainy season which peaks in August. A 2018 landslide in nearby Toukoli killed at least 20 people.
Since April 2023, Sudan has been ravaged by a war that erupted from a power struggle between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.
The rivals have responded to Sunday’s disaster.
Burhan’s Transitional Sovereignty Council, which heads the internationally recognised government based in Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast, mourned the victims on Tuesday.
It pledged to mobilise all available resources to support those affected by what it described as a “painful disaster”.
The rival government based in South Darfur state capital Nyala also weighed in on the tragedy.
Mohamed Hassan al-Taayshi, prime minister in the RSF-backed government, expressed deep sorrow and said solidarity must rise above politics.
“This is a profoundly human moment,” he said, adding that “the lives and safety of Sudanese citizens are above any political or military considerations”.
He also said that he had spoken directly with SLM leader Nur to assess needs on the ground.
Much of Darfur — including the area where the landslide occurred — remains inaccessible to international aid organisations due to ongoing fighting, severely limiting the delivery of emergency relief.
The disaster also comes during Sudan’s rainy season, which often renders mountain roads impassable.
In Sudan’s main war zones like Darfur, infrastructure was already fragile after more than two years of fighting.
Burhan’s forces retook central Sudan in a series of offensives earlier this year, leaving the RSF in control of most of Darfur and parts of Kordofan in the south.
The paramilitaries have moved to set up a rival government in the territories they still control.
This week, RSF commander Daglo was sworn in as head of its newly-formed presidential council while Taayshi was sworn in as prime minister.
The war has killed tens of thousands of people and driven more than 14 million from their homes, according to UN figures.
