‘Sudan’ air raid kills 16 civilians near Abu Karshola, South Kordofan

An Antonov aircraft “belonging to the Sudanese Air Force” dropped 13 bombs on a village northeast of Abu Karshola in South Kordofan on Sunday, killing 16 civilians and wounding five more.The air raid on Asabah occurred at 5.30pm. All of the victims belonged to five families. Colonel Al Gadi Rumboy, military spokesman of the SRF rebel coalition described the raid as “a major civilian massacre”. “The Government and their militias are continuously targeting unarmed civilians,” he said.Abu Karshola, a town located near Umm Rawaba in North Kordofan, has been under rebel control for more than a week. On 27 April rebels are said to have attacked the towns. They claim to have “repulsed an SAF attack and pursued the government troops until inside Abu Karshola and Umm Rawaba” before withdrawing from the latter.Clashes in the areas of Umm Rawaba and Abu Karshola led to the displacement of thousands of citizens to El Rahad town in North Kordofan. Sources from El Rahad town stated that the number of displaced people from Abu Karshola continues to grow. The count now exceeds 27,000, Radio Tamazuj reports.“The health conditions of the displaced people are very poor in the light of the insistence of the Sudanese government not to allow humanitarian organizations to enter the area and relieve the war-affected citizens,” said an anonymous local source.Meanwhile, in response to growing demands for the need to accommodate the thousands of newly displaced people in North and South Kordofan, Interior Minister Ibrahim Mahmoud Hamed has refused to establish any new camps for displaced people in Sudan.His remarks were published in newspapers in Khartoum, which pointed to the absence of any direction within the government to establish new displaced camps in North Kordofan. Parliament also rejected the idea of establishing camps in El Rahad for the people fleeing Abu Karshola.The deputy chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Legislation, Yasser Abu Kasawy, also told reporters that the government will not allow the establishment of new camps.He explained that the more than 30,000 displaced will be “hosted in centres, school buildings and under trees in Abu Karshola until the town is free”. He asserted that “establishing camps would reproduce the Darfur crisis in North Kordofan”.File photo by Albert Gonzalez Farran/ UNAMID (cropped)Related: SRF claims to ‘inflict heavy losses’ on Sudan forces in Kordofan (7 May 2013)