U.N. says at least 91 killed in besieged Darfur city last month

CAIRO (AP) – At least 91 civilians were killed in Sudan’s besieged city of el-Fasher in attacks by the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, within 10 days last month, the United Nations said Thursday.

The series of attacks were the latest in the intensified fighting between the army and rival paramilitaries seeking to control the city.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said Thursday that the city’s Daraja Oula neighborhood has been repeatedly attacked during RSF artillery shelling, drone strikes and ground incursions between Sept. 19 and 29.

Türk called for urgent action to prevent “large-scale, ethnically-driven attacks and atrocities in El Fasher.”

In its latest attack in the city, the RSF fired a missile that killed 16 people, including three women, and injured 21 people, including five children on Wednesday, the Sudan Doctors Network said.

The network said residential neighborhoods were targeted in what it described as a “massacre.” El-Fasher is the military’s last stronghold in the sprawling Darfur region, which has been the epicenter of the violence along with Kordofan.

The RSF did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press.

The civil war between the RSF and the military erupted in 2023 and soon engulfed the country, killing at least 40,000 people, according to the World Health Organization, and displacing as many as 12 million others. Over 24 million people are facing acute food insecurity, according to the World Food Program.

Wednesday’s attack came about a week after the RSF struck a bustling market in the city, killing 15 people. A separate strike on a mosque before that killed at least 70 people.

The Resistance Committees in el-Fasher, a network of local people, including activists, that tracks the fighting and war-related abuses, said late Wednesday that the RSF used drones and artillery to target a group of civilians in the Daraga Oula neighborhood in the west of el-Fasher city. It’s unclear whether that is the same attack reported by the Sudan Doctors Network.

The siege imposed by the RSF on the city has exacerbated an already dire humanitarian situation in el-Fasher, according to aid workers. Trapped residents and journalists are suffering from the lack of access to adequate food, clean water and medical assistance.

A Wednesday report by the Committee to Protect Journalists detailed testimonies from seven journalists who faced violence, arrests, rape and starvation.

Journalists who spoke to the international organization said that RSF fighters use informants in the city to help identify media personnel and where they live. One journalist, who hasn’t been named over fear of reprisals, said fighters raided her home and ordered her family to leave before “three armed men beat and gang-raped her.”

“Everyone is afraid to work,” Lana Awad Hassan, a journalist who fled the city months after the RSF shot her in the leg, told CPJ. “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 delivered limited aid through an airdrop on el-Fasher at dawn Monday, Mohanad Elbalal, co-founder of the Khartoum Aid Kitchen, told the AP. He cited accounts from journalists and aid workers on the ground. The airdrop was the first such aid delivery since fighting in the city escalated in April.

Egypt, Sudan’s neighboring nation, said Wednesday that its foreign minister Badr Abdelatty responded positively to efforts to end the siege on el-Fasher during a meeting with his Sudanese counterpart Mohi el-Din Salem, according to a statement from Cairo’s foreign ministry. The statement gave no further details about those efforts.

The Sudanese military said in a statement that it caused losses for the RSF on Tuesday in the city and “killed a large number of mercenaries from Colombia and Ukraine.” The army said the mercenaries included engineers specialized in drone systems.