Drone strike on a market kills 15

CAIRO (AP):

An aid worker and a local group in Sudan said a drone strike by the Sudanese paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) killed 15 people at a bustling market in the besieged city of el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur.

The strike on Tuesday came only a few days after the RSF reportedly struck a mosque in the city, killing at least 70 people, including worshippers and three medical personnel.

The latest drone strike also wounded 12 people, an aid worker with the Emergency Response Rooms (ERR) told The Associated Press on Wednesday, citing doctors and other ERR team members on the ground.

The aid worker said the attack happened Tuesday afternoon in a busy market in the city. Meanwhile, the Resistance Committees in el-Fasher, a network of local people, including activists, who are tracking the fighting and war-related abuses, confirmed the attack and the date in a statement on Facebook.

The group called it a “brutal attack that comes in a series of countless repeated massacres” carried out daily by the RSF “to bring the city to its knees and break the will of its residents.”

The RSF didn’t mention the incident on their Telegram channel but said that its fighters are making advances in the city, and claimed it was evacuating “hundreds of civilians from el-Fasher,” without providing evidence.

The fight between the RSF and the military erupted in 2023 and soon turned into a civil war that enveloped the country, killing at least 40,000 people, according to the World Health Organization, displacing as many as 12 million others. Over 24 million people are acutely food insecure, according to the World Food Program.

El-Fasher is the military’s last stronghold in the sprawling Darfur region. Fighting between the two sides intensified in recent months and hundreds of civilians were killed in RSF attacks in the area since April 10, according to a report by the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner.