Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces killed six people Wednesday in a joint drone and artillery attack on the besieged western city of El-Fasher, a medical worker told AFP.
“Another 10 people were injured” in the attack on the city’s Al-Daraja neighbourhood, the medic said from a local clinic, requesting anonymity because health workers have been routinely targeted in Sudan’s nearly 30-month war.
Since April 2023, the RSF’s war with Sudan’s regular army has killed tens of thousands and created the world’s largest hunger and displacement crisis.
The paramilitary force is currently waging its fiercest assault yet on El-Fasher, which is the last major city in the vast western region of Darfur still under army control.
The United Nations has said the city is the “epicentre of child suffering” where nearly 40 percent of those under the age of five are acutely or severely malnourished after 16 months of an RSF siege.
Civilians and the army have been encircled into progressively diminishing territory, with the RSF controlling all movement in and out of the city, where mass starvation has taken hold.
The local resistance committees, activists who coordinate aid and document atrocities, warn dozens of children are dying from hunger and disease.
The military this week said it successfully delivered an airdrop of supplies to its 6th Division infantry headquarters inside the city, the army’s last significant holdout position in the region.
The RSF this week published videos purportedly placing them less than a kilometre (mile) away from the military base.
This week, Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL), which has been tracking the conflict since it began, said satellite imagery shows the RSF is “preparing a large-scale drone attack from Nyala”, around 200 kilometres (125 miles) south of El-Fasher.
Between September 26 and 29, the lab identified 43 drones and 20 launchers appearing in the Nyala airport, from where the RSF has reportedly launched long-range drone strikes in the past.
At least 23 of the drones currently at the airport appear to be consistent with Iranian-made Shahed drones that have an operational range of 1,500-2,500 kilometres, according to the HRL.
Last month, an RSF drone strike on a mosque in the Al-Daraja neighbourhood killed more than 75 people.
In May, drone strikes targeted the army-aligned government’s wartime capital of Port Sudan, on the other side of the country on the Red Sea coast.
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© Agence France-Presse
