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A drone strike by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces on the besieged Sudanese city of El Fasher has killed 75 people worshipping in a mosque, first responders have said, as the group continued its push to capture the last foothold of Sudan’s army in the Darfur region.
The attack, one of the deadliest this year in the city, hit the city’s al-Daraja neighbourhood, where civilians from the famine-hit Abu Shouk displacement camp had fled after it was overrun by fighters .
“The bodies were retrieved from the rubble of the mosque,” said the Emergency Response Room volunteer group. Social media videos show bodies trapped under rubble and debris.
RSF has not commented on the incident. The paramilitary group has been engaged in a raging civil war with the Sudanese Armed Forces since April 2023 but since the army’s capture of the capital, Khartoum, in March, the RSF has been fighting to maintain territorial dominance of Darfur, its stronghold.
El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, is the last remaining capital in the region controlled by the Sudanese army and has been under siege for more than a year.
Research from Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab shows RSF is building an earthen wall around it to trap people inside.
Satellite imagery released by the lab on Thursday showed RSF forces advancing in many areas, including around the Abu Shouk camp and the former peacekeeping base for United Nations-African Union Hybrid Operation in Darfur (Unamid), now used by anti-RSF joint forces.
Photograph: Maxar Technologies
The city and the camp have been under an intensifying assault in recent months, experiencing artillery shelling and drone strikes.
Brutal attacks there killed at least 89 civilians over a 10-day period last month, with the UN high commissioner for human rights (OHCHR) saying some appeared to have been summary executions.
Last week, at least 13 people were killed in shelling of the city by RSF.
A new report by the OHCHR said at least 3,384 civilians were killed between January and June, mostly in Darfur – a figure representing nearly 80% of civilian casualties in Sudan last year.
Most of the killings were caused by artillery shelling and air and drone strikes in densely populated areas, and many deaths happened during the RSF’s offensive on El Fasher as well as the Zamzam and Abu Shouk camps in April, the report said.
The UN and rights groups have in the past reported that some killings have been ethnically targeted.
El Fasher is under a communications blackout, making it difficult to verify casualties or coordinate aid. At a briefing on Tuesday on the situation on the city organised by Avaaz, an advocacy group, participants talked of dire and deteriorating conditions in the city due to the assaults.
Fatima, an artist and lecturer who works with displaced communities in North Darfur, said civilians in El Fasher were enduring deliberate shelling, rapid deaths, slow deaths, injuries, starvation, disease, intimidation, and other inhumane practices daily. “This is a real catastrophe,” she said.
Mohammad Duda, spokesperson of Zamzam camp in North Darfur, said people in El Fasher were “being forced to hide in buried shipping containers as makeshift shelters”. He appealed to the international community “to intervene immediately and save the people of El Fasher from this catastrophic humanitarian crisis”.
Avaaz expressed concern that if El Fasher fell, RSF could carry out ethnically targeted attacks, as reported following the capture of Zamzam earlier this year and in Geneina in 2023.
The fighting in Sudan has created what the UN has described as one of the worst humanitarian crises of the 21st century. More than 150,000 people have been killed, more than 14 million have been displaced from their homes, and a larger number are in need of humanitarian aid.
