18 killed in Sudan's El-Fasher market attack as conflict deepens

Amid called by global leaders to an end to the country’s ongoing conflict, a paramilitary attack on a market in El-Fasher in Sudan killed 18 people, a medical source told AFP on Friday.

The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) shelled the market on Thursday evening, injuring dozens, according to activists. The attack is part of the ongoing battle between the RSF and Sudan’s regular army for control of the North Darfur state capital, now 17 months into the war that has devastated the northeast African nation.

Last week, the United Nations chief sharply criticized the powerful but deeply divided Security Council at a high-level meeting Wednesday for a failure of leadership to end wars in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and beyond.

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“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 told AFP, 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.

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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.

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 Daglo.

With inputs from agencies,