NEW YORK CITY: Britain’s foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, on Thursday called on the UN Security Council to confront “the bitter truth” that the world has been “catastrophically failing the people of Sudan.”
The UK is chairing the Security Council this month, and Cooper is serving as its president. Setting out the scale of the crisis in Sudan, which has been locked in civil war since April 2023, she cited a report by a fact-finding mission on atrocities in El-Fasher, commissioned by the UK, that was published on Thursday.
She highlighted its accounts of “indiscriminate shootings, point-blank executions of civilians in homes, streets, open areas or while attempting to flee the city.”
In one incident, Cooper said: “A pregnant woman was asked how far she was in her pregnancy. When she responded ‘seven months,’ he fired seven bullets into her abdomen, killing her.”
Hospitals, medical personnel and the wounded “were not spared,” she added, and survivors reported being raped in front of relatives, including children.
