Two days of attacks by Sudanese paramilitaries on the Darfur city of El Fasher killed 48 people, a medical source told AFP on Friday, after world leaders appealed for an end to the country’s suffering.
Artillery fire from the Rapid Support Forces killed 30 people and wounded dozens on Friday, a medical source at El Fasher Teaching Hospital told AFP, as the paramilitaries and regular army vie for control of the North Darfur state capital.
The shelling comes a day after an assault on a market brought “18 dead to the hospital” on Thursday, “some of them burned and others killed by shrapnel,” the source said, requesting anonymity for their protection in light of repeated attacks on health workers and hospitals.
The plight of Sudan, and El Fasher in particular, has been under discussion this week at the U.N. General Assembly in New York after 17 months of devastating fighting between the RSF and the regular army.
“We must compel the warring parties to accept humanitarian pauses in El Fasher, Khartoum and other highly vulnerable areas,” the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said Wednesday.
The Teaching Hospital is one of the last still receiving patients in El Fasher, where reports of a “full-scale assault” by RSF last weekend led U.N. chief Antonio Guterres to call for an urgent cease-fire.
The paramilitaries have besieged El Fasher since May, and famine has been declared in Zamzam refugee camp near the city of 2 million.
The war has killed tens of thousands of people. The World Health Organization has cited a toll of at least 20,000, but U.S. envoy Tom Perriello has said some estimates reach 150,000.
U.S. 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 warring generals, armed forces chief Abdel Fattah Burhan and RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.
“The world needs to stop arming the generals,” Biden told the U.N. General Assembly.
On the sidelines of the U.N. talks, Guterres met with Burhan, expressing concern about escalation and the risk of “a regional spillover,” the UN said.
Both sides have been repeatedly accused of war crimes.
The RSF, which has its origins in Darfur’s notorious Arab tribal militias, the Janjaweed, has been specifically 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 its 10 million people are internally displaced.
