GENEVA — Up to 12,000 refugees fled Sudan’s Darfur region to neighboring Chad over the weekend following airstrikes by the Sudanese military, and thousands more may be coming, the U.N. refugee agency said Sunday.
The agency was bringing emergency assistance to the Chad border where the Darfur refugees were giving detailed descriptions of air attacks Friday on three West Darfur towns.
The refugees are “destitute and terrified,” said Helene Caux, spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees headquartered in Geneva. “They told of their villages being looted and burned and encircled by militia.”
Most of the new refugees in Chad are men, and they told the U.N. that thousands of women and children are on their way, Caux added.
U.N. officials say the worsening situation in Darfur has been exacerbated by a recent rebel attack on the capital of neighboring Chad. Chad has accused Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir of backing those rebels in an effort to prevent deployment of a European peacekeeping force in the Chad-Sudan border region where some 400,000 refugees are living.
Sudan’s Arab-dominated government has been accused of unleashing more attacks by its allied janjaweed militias, which are accused of committing the worst atrocities against Darfur’s ethnic African communities. At least 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million displaced since the violence began five years ago.
On Friday, Sudanese helicopter gunships and fixed-wing aircraft bombed the towns of Sirba, Sileia and Abu Suruj while striking at rebel forces, which have been trying to consolidate their positions in West Darfur.
