91 civilians were killed in Sudan’s embattled city of el-Fasher over a span of 10 days last month, according to the United Nations, which accused the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of carrying out a series of deadly assaults.
The U.N. claimed that the paramilitary group repeatedly struck the city’s Daraja Oula neighborhood between September 19 and 29 with artillery, drones, and ground attacks. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned that urgent measures are needed to prevent “large-scale, ethnically-driven attacks and atrocities in El Fasher.”
The latest assault occurred Wednesday, when an RSF missile slammed into a residential area, killing 16 people, among them three women, and injuring 21 others, including five children, the Sudan Doctors Network said. The network described the incident as a “massacre,” noting that civilians remain the primary targets.
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El-Fasher, the military’s last stronghold in Darfur, has become the center of escalating violence, alongside Sudan’s Kordofan region. Just days earlier, the RSF had struck a mosque, killing at least 70 worshippers, while a separate attack on a busy market left 15 dead.
The Resistance Committees in el-Fasher, a coalition of activists documenting war crimes, said RSF fighters used both drones and artillery to target civilians in Daraja Oula, though it was unclear if this referred to the same strike reported by doctors.
Far worse than the rising death toll alone, the RSF siege has worsened already dire humanitarian conditions in the city. Residents face extreme shortages of food, water, and medicine, while journalists trapped inside have reported arrests, beatings, sexual violence, and intimidation. A Committee to Protect Journalists report this week detailed testimony from seven reporters, including one unnamed woman who said armed men raided her home and gang-raped her.
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“Everyone is afraid to work,” said journalist Lana Awad Hassan, who fled after being shot in the leg, in an AP report. “Even if you write a good report, you don’t publish it under your name. Both the RSF and the Sudanese army target journalists, but that does not stop us.”
The Sudanese military said it attempted to ease conditions in the city by dropping limited aid supplies on Monday, its first such delivery since fighting intensified in April. Cairo also announced that Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty had expressed support for efforts to lift the siege in talks with Sudan’s foreign minister, though no details were provided.
The army claimed on Tuesday that its forces had killed “a large number of mercenaries from Colombia and Ukraine,” describing them as drone specialists assisting the RSF.
Sudan’s civil war, which occurred in 2023, has killed at least 40,000 people and displaced an estimated 12 million, according to international agencies. The World Food Program says more than 24 million people across the country are now facing acute hunger.
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