At least nine people were killed and 20 others injured in a drone strike Friday on a hospital in the city of el-Fasher, the capital of Sudan’s North Darfur state.
The drone was sent by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), who are in a civil war with Sudan’s army. The RSF also fired four rocket-propelled grenades towards the city’s main healthcare facility, which treats injured Sudanese troops and civilians.
The attack on Saudi Hospital forced it it to suspend medical services. It was the last functioning hospital in the city, which has over 800,000 people, many of them refugees.
The Sudanese army and RSF have been fighting in el-Fasher since May, disrupting the flow of humanitarian relief in Sudan. The city was a hub for humanitarian efforts by international aid agencies.
The RSF and Sudan’s military are willing to kill large numbers of civilians as collateral damage in their attacks on each other. The drone attack Friday was just the most recent attack that killed civilians this week.
On December 9, over 100 people – including women and children – were killed in an air strike by the Sudan army on an open-air market in Kabkabiya, a town in North Darfur about 100 miles from el-Fasher.
“Bombing a market full of civilians is one of the clearest examples of a war crime that exists,” observed Tigere Chagutah, Amnesty International’s regional director.
On December 10, the RSF also shelled the biggest refugee camp in Sudan, Zamzam, which is also located in North Darfur. The attack killed at least a dozen people in the refugee camp, which is already plagued by a famine that results in children starving to death every day.
On December 10, the RSF also shelled army-controlled neighborhoods in the city of Omdurman – Sudan’s second biggest city – with heavy artillery fire, killing at least 120 people.
On October 25, the RSF killed at least 124 villagers in a terror campaign in Sudan’s Jazira state, the country’s breadbasket region.
When Sudan’s army launches attempts to retake portions of Sudan’s capital from the RSF, it will flatten whole neighborhoods before trying to retake those areas.
Both the Sudan Army and the RSF are less careful about killing civilians than Israel has been in its war in Gaza. The RSF and the Sudan Army kill many civilians for each opposing soldier they kill, unlike Israel. A much higher percentage of those killed by Israel in Gaza are combatants, as opposed to civilians, than in the conflict in Sudan, where at least 100,000 civilians have been shot or killed in shelling.
The RSF is slaughtering males from western Sudan’s black African Masalit tribe. It sexually enslaved some women, and raped others. The RSF committed mass killings and rapes to drive the Masalit ethnic group from Sudan into the neighboring country of Chad. The RSF slaughtered 1600 people, almost all Masalit, at a camp for displaced people in Western Sudan. It killed at least 1,000 Masalit in a single district of El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur state.
The atrocities committed by the RSF in Jazira drove hundreds of thousands of farmers out of that key farming area. That will exacerbate a famine in Sudan that researchers predict will kill six to ten million people by 2027.
In early October, a charity feeding starving refugees at Sudan’s largest refugee camp, Zamzam, was forced to pull out by fighting, leaving starving children unfed. Most of Sudan’s 50 million people are suffering from severe hunger.
This is a small portion of the suffering being experienced in Sudan, Africa’s third-largest country. As The Economist notes, in Sudan,
famine is consuming much of the country..It is almost certain to be as bad as, or worse than, the one that afflicted Ethiopia in the 1980s [which killed 1.2 million people]. If much more help does not arrive very soon, it may prove the worst anywhere in the world since millions starved to death during China’s Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
In May the Clingendael Institute, a Dutch think-tank, released a report which estimated that hunger and related diseases would kill more than 2 million people in Sudan by the end of the year. Timmo Gaasbeek, the report’s author, has since extended his projections to cover the next two years. In an “optimistic scenario”, in which fighting stops and this year’s harvest, expected in October, is slightly better than the last, he predicts around 6 million “excess deaths” by 2027. In the (more likely) scenario in which fighting continues until early next year, more than 10 million may perish. Although some experts have lower estimates, there is an emerging consensus that without decisive action Sudan faces mass starvation on a scale not seen in decades….At least 245 towns or villages have been burnt. Much of Khartoum, the capital, has been flattened.
Earlier, the water supply for the region containing one of Sudan’s largest cities (Port Sudan) was destroyed, when a dam collapsed, killing hundreds of people.
Sudan’s national museum was looted by the RSF. The museum housed “the world’s largest and most comprehensive Nubian archaeological collection, along with artifacts from other ancient civilizations including the Kingdom of Kush (8th-4th century BCE) and the medieval Kingdom of Alwa. The Nubian collection” included “embalmed mummies dating back to 2,500 BC, making them among the earliest and most important such examples in the world.” The museum also had some Christian relics from Sudan’s pre-Islamic period. Sudan, like Egypt, has pyramids and mummies.
Tens of thousands of Sudanese have previously died of starvation during the war. Thousands of bodies were left decomposing in morgues in the country’s capital.
Over a decade ago, Sudan’s military created the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a genocidal militia it used to wipe out villages inhabited by some African tribes in Sudan’s Darfur region. Now, this Frankenstein’s monster, the RSF, is fighting Sudan’s military in a civil war, and has taken over much of Sudan.
