PORT SUDAN: Officials, activists, and attorneys reported on Tuesday that at least 176 people had been killed in two days of army and paramilitary attacks throughout Sudan.
According to the state’s army-aligned governor, paramilitary shelling in Omdurman, a neighborhood of the capital of Sudan, killed at least 65 people and injured hundreds more on Tuesday.
Ahmed Othman Hamza, the governor of Khartoum, claimed that a single shell on a passenger bus “killed everyone on board and turned 22 people into body parts.”
He blamed the attack on “the terrorist militia,” referring to the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group that has been at war with the army since April 2023.
The pro-democracy Emergency Lawyers said Tuesday that the attack occurred one day after an army airstrike on a market in the town of Kabkabiya in North Darfur killed more than 100 people.
Due to fighting between the army and paramilitary groups throughout the nation, half of Darfur’s population is displaced.
The lawyers’ group, which has been recording human rights violations during the conflict, said, “The air strike occurred on the town’s weekly market day, when residents from various nearby villages had gathered to shop, resulting in the death of more than 100 people and the injury of hundreds, including women and children.”
The attorneys also stated that a drone that crashed on November 26 exploded in North Kordofan state, killing six persons.
Five individuals were killed Tuesday by paramilitary shelling at the famine-stricken Zamzam displacement camp in North Darfur, according to the Darfur General Coordination of Camps for the Displaced and Refugees, a civil society organization.
Following a months-long RSF siege of the state capital El-Fasher and the surrounding territory, a UN-backed assessment in July concluded that starvation had spread throughout the camp.
The worst combat in months
Tens of thousands have been dead, 12 million have been displaced, and the conflict between the RSF and the regular army has resulted in what the UN has dubbed the biggest humanitarian crisis in recent memory.
Khartoum, which neither side has been able to claim control of, has also been all but destroyed.
The RSF controls Khartoum North (Bahri) to the east, while the army controls the majority of Omdurman, the capital’s twin city across the Nile.
Homes on both banks have frequently been hit by bombs and shrapnel, and residents have been reporting shelling across the river for a long time.
Witnesses reported that artillery was hitting Omdurman from several directions on Tuesday.
An eyewitness to the shelling of the passenger bus remarked, “We haven’t seen bombing this intense in six months.”
Another alleged firing was directed on RSF positions in western Omdurman and across the river in Bahri from the Wadi Seidna army facility in northern Omdurman.
At the moment, the army rules the north and east of the nation in addition to portions of the capital. The RSF has taken control of large portions of southern Kordofan, central Sudan, and the huge western province of Darfur.
