48 dead in two days of Sudanese paramilitary attacks on the city of Darfur, a doctor says

Two days of attacks by Sudanese paramilitaries on the Darfur town of El Fasher left 48 people dead, a medical source told AFP on Friday, after world leaders called for an end to the country’s suffering.

Artillery fire from the Rapid Support Forces killed 30 people and injured dozens on Friday, a medical source at El Fasher Teaching Hospital told AFP, as the paramilitaries and the regular army vie for control of the state capital North Darfur.

The shelling came a day after an attack on a market on Thursday that “sent 18 dead to hospital,” “some of them burned to death and others killed by shrapnel,” the source said, requesting anonymity because of the repeated attacks to protect the health of workers and hospitals.

The plight in Sudan and El Fasher in particular was discussed at the UN General Assembly in New York this week after 17 months of devastating fighting between the RSF and the regular army.

“We must force the warring parties to accept humanitarian pauses in El Fasher, Khartoum and other high-risk areas,” U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield said Wednesday.

The teaching hospital is one of the last still accepting patients in El Fasher, where reports of a “major attack” by RSF last weekend led UN chief Antonio Guterres to call for an urgent ceasefire.

The paramilitaries have been besieging El Fasher since May and a famine has been declared in the Zamzam refugee camp near the city of two million inhabitants.

The war killed tens of thousands of people. The World Health Organization puts the death toll at at least 20,000, but U.S. envoy Tom Perriello said some estimates put it at 150,000.

US President Joe Biden, who expressed particular concern over the attack on El Fasher, on Tuesday called on all countries to stop arms supplies to the country’s feuding generals, army chief Abdel Fattah Burhan and RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.

“The world must stop arming the generals,” Biden told the UN General Assembly.

On the sidelines of the U.N. talks, Guterres met with Burhan and expressed concern about escalation and the risk of “regional spillover,” the U.N. said.

Both sides have repeatedly been accused of war crimes.

The RSF, which has its origins in Darfur’s notorious Arab tribal militias, the Janjaweed, is particularly accused of crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.

Darfur, a region the size of France, is home to around a quarter of Sudan’s population, but more than half of the 10 million people are internally displaced.