RSF drone strike on mosque in besieged Sudanese city kills scores

As part of their ongoing effort to seize the final stronghold of Sudan’s army in the Darfur region, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces launched a drone strike on the beleaguered Sudanese city of El Fasher, killing 75 worshippers inside a mosque, according to first responders.

The al-Daraja neighborhood, where residents of the famine-stricken Abu Shouk displacement camp had fled when it was overrun by fighters, was the scene of one of the city’s worst attacks this year.

“The bodies were retrieved from the rubble of the mosque,” said the Emergency Response Room volunteer group. Social media videos show bodies trapped under rubble and debris.

Regarding the incident, RSF has not made any comments. Since April 2023, the paramilitary group has been fighting the Sudanese Armed Forces in a bloody civil war. However, since the army took control of Khartoum in March, the RSF has been fighting to keep control of Darfur, which is their heartland.

The capital of North Darfur state, El Fasher, has been under siege for more than a year and is the last capital in the area still under Sudanese army control. RSF is erecting an earthen wall around El Fasher in order to keep people inside, according to research from Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab.

RSF forces advanced in numerous places, including the vicinity of the Abu Shouk camp and the former United Nations-African Union Hybrid Operation in Darfur (Unamid) peacekeeping base, which is currently occupied by anti-RSF joint forces, according to satellite imagery made public by the lab on Thursday.

In recent months, artillery fire and drone strikes have intensified the attack on the city and the camp. At least 89 civilians were killed in brutal attacks there over a 10-day period last month; according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), some of the deaths seemed to be summary executions. According to a recent OHCHR estimate, at least 3,384 people were killed between January and June, primarily in Darfur. This number accounts for almost 80% of the civilian deaths in Sudan last year.

According to the report, the majority of the casualties occurred during the RSF’s onslaught on El Fasher, the Zamzam, and Abu Shouk camps in April, and the majority were brought on by artillery bombardment, airstrikes, and drone strikes in heavily populated areas.

In the past, the UN and human rights organizations have noted that certain murders have been committed with an ethnic focus.

The communications outage in El Fasher makes it challenging to coordinate help or confirm casualties. Participants in a Tuesday briefing on the city’s status hosted by advocacy group Avaaz discussed the terrible and worsening conditions brought on by the attacks.

Mohammad Duda, spokesperson of Zamzam camp in North Darfur, said people in El Fasher were “being forced to hide in buried shipping containers as makeshift shelters”. He appealed to the international community “to intervene immediately and save the people of El Fasher from this catastrophic humanitarian crisis”.