Sudan: RSF drone strike kills 15 in El-Fasher market amid escalating violence

Drone strike on a market in Sudan kills 15, aid worker and local group say

An aid worker and a local group in Sudan said a drone strike by the Sudanese paramilitary Rapid Support Forces killed 15 people at a bustling market in the besieged city of el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur.

The strike on Tuesday came only a few days after the RSF reportedly struck a mosque in the city, killing at least 70 people, including worshippers and three medical personnel.

The latest drone strike also wounded 12 people, an aid worker with the Emergency Response Rooms, or ERR, told The Associated Press on Wednesday, citing doctors and other ERR team members on the ground. He spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the RSF.

The aid worker said the attack happened Tuesday afternoon in a busy market in the city. Meanwhile, the Resistance Committees in el-Fasher, a network of local people, including activists, who are tracking the fighting and war-related abuses, confirmed the attack and the date in a statement on Facebook.

The group called it a “brutal attack that comes in a series of countless repeated massacres” carried out daily by the RSF “to bring the city to its knees and break the will of its residents.”

The RSF didn’t mention the incident on their Telegram channel but said that its fighters are making advances in the city, and claimed it was evacuating “hundreds of civilians from el-Fasher,” without providing evidence.

The fight between the RSF and the military erupted in 2023 and soon turned into a civil war that enveloped the country, killing at least 40,000 people, according to the World Health Organization, displacing as many as 12 million others. Over 24 million people are acutely food insecure, according to the World Food Program.

El-Fasher is the military’s last stronghold in the sprawling Darfur region. Fighting between the two sides intensified in recent months and hundreds of civilians were killed in RSF attacks in the area since Apr. 10, according to a Friday report by the U.N. Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner.

Some areas in Darfur currently face a dire situation, impacting people’s access to healthcare, food, and clean water, according to aid organizations. The number of reported cholera cases is increasing and more than 3,000 people across all of Sudan have died from the illness over the last 14 months of civil war, the U.N. health agency said Tuesday.

The current outbreak of the bacterial infection caused by contaminated food or water has spread to all 18 states in the war-torn country after it was declared an outbreak since July of last year, the WHO said.

Both warring sides have been accused of committing atrocities, including ethnic cleansing, extrajudicial killings and sexual violence against civilians, including children.