Children Among Dozens Killed in Attack on Sudanese Village

A gun and artillery assault by Sudanese paramilitaries on a village in Sudan’s main farming region killed at least 104 people, including dozens of children, Sudanese pro-democracy activists said.

The exact circumstances of the attack on Wednesday at Wad al-Noura, a village 70 miles south of the capital, Khartoum, were disputed.

But the high death toll, as well as images of a mass burial on Thursday that circulated on social media, and were verified by The New York Times, drew international condemnation and made the assault the latest flashpoint in Sudan’s brutal yearlong war.

“Even by the tragic standards of Sudan’s conflict, the images emerging from Wad Al-Noura are heartbreaking,” Clementine Nkweta-Salami, the top U.N. official in Sudan, said in a statement.

“The world is watching,” the British Foreign Secretary, David Cameron, wrote on social media. “Those responsible will be held to account.”

Still, Sudan has seen numerous atrocities yet little accountability since it plunged into a disastrous civil war just over a year ago, when fighting broke out between the national army and a powerful paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces.