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PORT SUDAN: Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces killed at least 30 civilians in a two-day assault on a village in the country’s western region of Kordofan, a war monitor said Friday.

In recent months, as the war between the paramilitary troops and the regular army roared into its third year, Kordofan has emerged as a key battlefront, with the paramilitaries seeking to consolidate their control in the west after losing the capital Khartoum.

The Emergency Lawyers, a group that has documented atrocities throughout the war, said paramilitary fighters attacked the village of Brima Rasheed on Wednesday and Thursday, killing three civilians in the first raid and 27 others the following day.

It added in a statement that the dead included women and children.

The Emergency Lawyers said the paramilitary troops’ “indiscriminate killing” of civilians constituted “a serious violation” of international law.

Casualty figures are nearly impossible to independently verify, with most health facilities shut down and large swaths of Sudan inaccessible to journalists.

The monitor said sporadic clashes were also reported between paramilitary fighters and armed civilians in Brima Rasheed village, near the RSF-held city of En Nahud in West Kordofan state — a key transit point once used by the army to send reinforcements further west.

The Emergency Lawyers said that in recent days violence has spread across En Nahud, with reports of dozens of civilians killed and residential areas attacked.

The group added that the RSF also stormed major medical facilities in the city, expelling patients and using hospitals to treat wounded paramilitary fighters.

Those who resisted were beaten or detained, the Emergency Lawyers said.

Meanwhile, the UN said Friday that more than 1.3 million people who fled the fighting in Sudan have headed home, pleading for greater international aid to help returnees rebuild shattered lives.

Over a million internally displaced people have returned to their homes in recent months, UN agencies said.

A further 320,000 refugees have crossed back into Sudan this year, mainly from neighboring Egypt and South Sudan.

While fighting has subsided in the “pockets of relative safety” to where people are beginning to return, the situation remains highly precarious, the UN said.

In a joint statement, the UN’s IOM migration agency, UNHCR refugee agency and UNDP development agency called for an urgent increase in financial support to fund the recovery as people begin to return.

It said humanitarian operations were “massively underfunded.”

Sudan has 10 million IDPs, including 7.7 million forced from their homes by the current conflict, they said.

Over 4 million have sought refuge in neighboring countries.

Sudan is “the largest humanitarian catastrophe facing our world and also the least remembered,” the IOM’s regional director Othman Belbeisi, speaking from Port Sudan, told a media briefing in Geneva.

He said most of the returns (71 percent) had been to Al-Jazira state, while 8 percent had been to Khartoum.

Other returnees were mostly heading for Sennar state. Both Al-Jazira and Sennar are located southeast of Khartoum.

With the army controlling Sudan’s center, north and east, and the RSF holding nearly all of the western Darfur region, Kordofan in the south has become the main battleground of the war in recent weeks.

“We expect 2.1 million to return to Khartoum by the end of this year but this will depend on many factors, especially the security situation and the ability to restore services in a timely manner,” Belbeisi said.

He said the “vicious, horrifying civil war continues to take lives with impunity,” imploring the warring factions to put down their guns.

“The war has unleashed hell for millions and millions of ordinary people,” he said.

“Sudan is a living nightmare. The violence needs to stop.”