Essay: Recent violence in the Nuba Mountains highlights that nowhere is safe in Sudan anymore

ELLIS HEASLEY, of UK-based religious freedom advocacy CSW, says some attacks on clergy in Sudan appear to be ethnically motivated while in other cases the motivation has been more overtly religious…

London, UK

On 23rd July, Rev Adil Idris Jangoul of the Sudanese Episcopal Church was arrested by members of the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Movement-North (SPLM/N) at his residence in Heban, in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains. CSW sources report that all his money was seized, but that his arrest was not violent, and that he complied and co-operated without resistance.

Hours later his body was found on a local road. There were six others with him, and all appeared to have been executed extrajudicially.

Rev Adil Idris Jangoul. PICTURE: Courtesy of CSW

Rev Jangoul and those discovered alongside him belonged to the predominantly Christian Otoro ethnic group, which is the largest tribe in the area. Tensions between this community and others have been escalating in the Nuba Mountains for several months – ever since the SPLM/N, which is the ruling authority in the region, demarcated land between the Otoro, the Shawaya and other ethnic groups.

Members of the Otoro community have attacked Shawaya villages, and violence has since extended to the Kawaleeb tribe – also predominantly Christian – to which the commander of the SPLM/N belongs.

On 19th June, Fr Youhanna Al Amin Nyaroum of the Kawaleeb and church guards Youhan Marcus and Joahn Adam were killed when Otoro fighters attacked and looted the Catholic church in Kadua for the second consecutive day. A third church guard was injured in the attack.

Later, on 23rd July – the same day that Rev Jangoul was arrested and executed – members of the Otoro tribe killed at least ten people and took at least 20 hostages in an attack on Heban. Among the hostages was Rev Yakoub Ibrahim Tia, the former general secretary of the Sudanese Church of Christ who is a member of the Shawaya tribe, and six members of his family. All of the hostages were released safely on 28th July following appeals by church ministers from different ethnic groups.

While such incidents appear to have been largely ethnically motivated – albeit clearly affecting members of religious communities – in other cases violence has manifested along more overtly religious lines. On the morning of 6th April – Easter Monday – members of the Sudan Presbyterian Evangelical Church in South Morta awoke to find their church had been burned down overnight.

The church had previously come under threat in 2019 when a group of Muslim residents complained to the local authority about its presence. The local mayor initially responded by ordering the church to stop all activities and demolish their building, but was later convinced to allow it to remain open after administrators argued that it was the only Christian place of worship in the area.

The community had been permitted to worship peacefully since then, and has now resumed doing so under trees on the church grounds whilst reconstruction efforts continue.

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The spread of such violence into a region that has stood out for centuries as a bastion of ethnic and religious diversity and peaceful coexistence is highly concerning. These incidents, which are occurring against the backdrop of the conflict between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) that has driven some to seek refuge in the area despite the growing severity of the humanitarian situation, highlight the extent to which nowhere in Sudan is safe for civilians anymore.

To the north of the mountains, citizens of El Obeid in North Kordofan State have endured more than 18 months of siege-like conditions at the hands of the RSF, with the recent capture of nearby towns by the SAF having done little to alleviate severe water shortages and extortionate food prices in the city – or to stop RSF drones hovering over it.

Last month, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, warned of the risk of ‘another human rights catastrophe’ unfolding in El Obeid, insisting that the international community ‘cannot allow a repeat’ of the widespread atrocities perpetrated by the RSF in and around the city of El Fasher in Darfur, which it captured in October, 2025, and other cities through the duration of the conflict.

Meanwhile, communities across the country continue to reckon with similar challenges to those now arising in the Nuba Mountains: places of worship reduced to rubble along with schools and hospitals,  arbitrary detention by de facto authorities from whom they cannot expect any semblance of due process, and the deliberate targeting of individuals based on their religion, belief, ethnicity or place of origin.

An estimated 4.5 million people have been displaced from the country altogether, while a further 6.5 million are currently residing in camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) which are also vulnerable to attack. In addition, the British Red Cross reported in April this year that over 33 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, among them 3.2 million children under the age of five and 1.2 million pregnant and breastfeeding women who are currently experiencing acute malnourishment.

Egypt,Türkiye and the United Arab Emirates, the latter of which experts have suggested could end the war in two weeks. I have written previously in this column of CSW’s ambitious efforts to make this happen, but as lives continue to be lost and much of the world continues to shrug, I think it is a drum worth banging again.

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Ellis Heasley is public affairs officer at UK-based religious freedom advocacy CSW.