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At least 18 people died after a paramilitary attack on a market in the Sudanese city of El-Fasher, a medical source told AFP on Friday.
Following that attack, world leaders have called for an end to the country’s wartime suffering.
The Rapid Support Forces’ shelling of the market 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.
A source who pleaded anonymous at the El-Fasher Teaching Hospital told AFP that, “We received last night at the hospital 18 dead,” some of them burned and others killed with severe shrapnel injuries."
The plight of Sudan, and El-Fasher in particular, has been under discussion this week at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield said, “We must compel the warring parties to accept humanitarian pauses in El-Fasher, Khartoum and other highly vulnerable areas."
The Teaching Hospital is one of the last still receiving patients in El-Fasher, where reports of a “full-scale assault” by RSF 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 neighbourhoods 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 concern over the assault on El-Fasher, calling on countries to halt weapons supplies to the country’s rival generals, Sudanese Armed Forces chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo
“The world needs to stop arming the generals,” Biden told the UN General Assembly.
