Medic says 18 dead in Sudan’s El-Fasher after paramilitary attack on market

A paramilitary attack on a market in the Sudanese city of El-Fasher killed 18 people, a medical source told AFP on Friday, after world leaders appealed for an end to the country’s wartime suffering.

The Rapid Support Forces’ shelling of the market on Thursday evening also injured dozens, activists said separately, as the paramilitaries and regular army vie for control of the North Darfur state capital, 17 months into their war in the northeast African country.

“We received last night at the hospital 18 dead,” some of them burned and others killed with severe shrapnel injuries, a source at El-Fasher Teaching Hospital said, requesting anonymity for their own protection.

The plight of Sudan, and El-Fasher in particular, has been under discussion this week at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

“We must compel the warring parties to accept humanitarian pauses in El-Fasher, Khartoum and other highly vulnerable areas,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the UN, said on Wednesday.

The Teaching Hospital is one of the last still receiving patients in El-Fasher, where reports of a “full-scale assault” by RSF on the city last weekend led UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to call for an urgent ceasefire.

The paramilitaries have besieged El-Fasher since May, and famine has already been declared in Zamzam refugee camp near the city of two million.

Paramilitary “artillery shelling continued this morning” on residential neighborhoods and the market, the local resistance committee said on Friday.

The committee, which reported the dozens of wounded in Thursday’s market attack, is one of hundreds of pro-democracy volunteer groups across Sudan that provide crucial aid to civilians caught in the crossfire.

Sudan’s war has killed tens of thousands of people. The World Health Organization cited a toll of at least 20,000 but United States envoy Tom Perriello has said some estimates reach 150,000.

US President Joe Biden, who raised particular concern over the assault on El-Fasher, on Tuesday urged all countries to cut off weapons supplies to the country’s rival generals, Sudanese Armed Forces chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.

‘Stop,’ says Biden

“The world needs to stop arming the generals. Speak with one voice and tell them: ‘Stop tearing your country apart. Stop blocking aid to the Sudanese people. End this war now,’” Biden told the UN General Assembly.

On the sidelines of the UN talks, Guterres met with al-Burhan, expressing concern about “escalation” and the risk of “a regional spillover,” the UN said.

Both sides have been repeatedly accused of war crimes.

The RSF, descended from Darfur’s Janjaweed militia, have specifically been accused of ethnic cleansing.

Dagalo released a video Thursday evening addressing the UN gathering, hours afteral- Burhan took the stage in New York wearing a formal suit instead of his military fatigues.

Rejecting al-Burhan’s participation, Dagalo said the RSF had “formed a force to protect civilians” and was “open to all initiatives” aimed at peace.

Also on Thursday, airstrikes and shelling rocked the capital Khartoum as the army attacked paramilitary positions across the Sudanese capital, witnesses and a military source said.

The UN’s human rights chief, Volker Turk, warned on Thursday that, “if El-Fasher falls, there is a high risk of ethnically-targeted violations and abuses, including summary executions and sexual violence, by the RSF and allied militia.”

Darfur is home to more than five million displaced people, or around half of the country’s current internal displacement, which the UN said is the world’s worst.

“Sudan is now also the world’s largest hunger crisis,” the UN said in a statement on Wednesday.