Hundreds of civilians dead after targeted attacks in North Darfur

Suffering at “a catastrophic level”

Targeted attacks on civilians in North Darfur: many dead

A bloody civil war has been raging in Sudan for 20 months. The fighting is concentrated in a city in the north, where hundreds of civilians are believed to have been killed.

In the conflict in Sudan, hundreds of people have been killed in the seven-month-long battle for the capital of the state of North Darfur alone. The United Nations said in a report that at least 782 people were killed and more than 1,143 injured in El Fasher.

For the report, 52 people who fled the city were interviewed. According to them, densely populated residential areas are regularly and intensively shelled and also attacked from the air. The respondents’ statements were confirmed by several other independent sources.

In Sudan in the Horn of Africa, there has been a bloody power struggle between de facto ruler Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo since April 2023. Daglo’s RSF militia controls most of Darfur; El Fasher is the last major city where the government still has control. More than eleven million people have fled the nationwide fighting, around half of them are children and young people.

Thousands of residents of El Fasher are affected by the siege by the conflict parties. Anyone trying to leave the city would be subject to indiscriminate attacks from both sides, it said.

The parties to the conflict have been disregarding international humanitarian law and human rights for months. These actions “could constitute war crimes,” warned Li Fung, the representative of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Sudan.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk called for an end to the siege of El Fasher. The situation will raise the suffering of the civilian population to “a catastrophic level and further exacerbate the already catastrophic humanitarian situation, including famine,” Turk said.

The UN World Food Program (WFP) said it was “outraged by the killing of three of its staff” in an airstrike in Sudan. A WFP office was hit in the attack, it said in a message on Platform X. Further details, such as the exact location of the attack or the nationality of the employees, were not initially known.