UNAMID peacekeepers/via UNAMID

According to a statement released by the UN and the joint African Union-United Nations Mission in Darfur (UNAMID), a morning patrol was ambushed and "came under heavy fire from a large unidentified group approximately 25 kilometres west of the Mission's Khor Abeche team site." UNAMID spokesman Chris Cycmanick said that the assailants attacked with machine guns and possibly rocket-propelled grenades.

Reinforcements from two nearby bases arrived following an extended firefight and that the ambushed patrol was extracted, the UNAMID statement said. The UN said in a separate statement that the peacekeeping troops were from Tanzania.

The assailants in Saturday's ambush have not been identified and no one has claimed responsibility for the attack.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed outrage and condemned the attack in a statement to the UN News Service. "The Secretary General condemns this heinous attack on UNAMID, the third in three weeks," the statement said. Mr. Ban "expects that the government of Sudan will take swift action to bring the perpetrators to justice."

Saturday's ambush was the deadliest attack on UN forces in Sudan since the peacekeeping mission began in 2008. Violence in the region has "sharply intensified," according to the UN Undersecretary for Peacekeeping, Hervé Ladsous, and that nearly 300,000 people had fled the area since the beginning of 2013.  

Last week, two NGO workers from World Vision International were killed in south Darfur during a shoot-out between Sudanese troops and rebels.

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