U.S. and European media

December 17, 2022

Reuters: Darfur peacekeepers to miss deployment targets. Peacekeepers in Darfur will fail to meet even scaled-down deployment targets by the end of the year and will have little more than half the planned force in place then, according to figures released on Wednesday. The joint United Nations/African Union UNAMID force, set up in January, was supposed to have 26,000 soldiers and police to keep the peace in the west Sudanese region -- about the size of France. The United Nations had initially hoped to get 80 percent of the force on the ground by the end of its first year. In October, following a string of hold-ups, it lowered that target to 60 percent. But the figures released by UNAMID showed the force would only reach 54 percent of full strength by the end of the year with 10,609 soldiers on the ground and 1,416 due this month. Another 2,114 police are already in active service.

Agence France Presse: 'Thousands' enslaved in Darfur: charity report. Sudanese government soldiers and militia have forced kidnapped men, women and children into labour and sexual slavery in the war-torn region of Darfur, a coalition of African charities said on Wednesday. The Darfur Consortium said it had uncovered evidence for the first time that men were abducted and enslaved as agricultural labourers during attacks in western Sudan, where regional conflict is poised to enter a seventh year. Most of those abducted are women and girls, who are subjected to rape and forced marriage, even used as sex slaves and domestic workers by soldiers in Khartoum, while men and boys are forced into farm work, the study said.

Agence France Presse: Sudan refugees leave Iraq for Romania: UNHCR. Nearly 100 Sudanese refugees mainly from Darfur have left a makeshift camp in the Iraqi desert for Romania as part of a resettlement programme, the UN refugee agency said Tuesday. Under a deal struck between the Jordanian and Romanian governments, 97 refugees were now on route to Romania, where they will be housed in an emergency transit centre in Timisoara pending resettlement, said the UNHCR. They "fear returning to their country, where they would find themselves in a situation of internal displacement," it added.

The Darfur Daily News is a service of the Save Darfur Coalition. To subscribe to the Daily News, please email [email protected]. For media inquiries, please contact Ashley Roberts at (202) 478-6181, or [email protected].