Hundreds of people have been killed by drones in and around the city of El-Obeid, which has around 600,000 people. It’s in Sudan, which has been embroiled in a civil war for 3 years. In a village near El-Obeid, a drone killed 65 people at a funeral gathering.
Earlier, “a drone attack by the Sudanese paramilitary forces hit a kindergarten in” the town of Kalogli in “south-central Sudan, killing 50 people, including 33 children,” reported the Associated Press. Then it returned to kill paramedics at the scene.
Millions of people in Sudan lost power last month due to drone strikes on a key power plant.
The drones were sent by the Rapid Support Forces, a militia that has committed genocide against the Masalit people of western Sudan. The RSF have also slaughtered tens of thousands of the Zaghawa people after seizing the major city of El Fasher. It also has kidnapped thousands of people and held them for random, torturing many of them.
Now, RSF drones are targeting the bigger city of El-Obeid. A news report notes that “Drone strikes have intensified in and around El-Obeid in central Sudan as the country’s devastating civil war closes in on the army-controlled city, causing significant civilian deaths…The city is one of Sudan’s most important and the capital of North Kordofan state.”
“After the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) tightened their grip on the westernmost Darfur region in late October, they shifted their focus to Kordofan and drones have struck weekly in and around El-Obeid…At around the same time, the paramilitary’s ground forces began taking over towns and villages across the Kordofan region, while also besieging cities in South Kordofan state.” The RSF “has not yet approached El-Obeid,” but its bloody incursion into the region led to “an exodus” from El-Obeid “late last year as the war intensified.”
Sudan’s civil “war erupted in April 2023 after the army and RSF clashed over their roles in a planned political transition. It has driven half the population into hunger and famine and decimated the country’s economy.”
At least 400,000 people have died in the civil war.
“Drones have come to play an increasingly dominant role in the war, with the RSF in particular using them” to overcome “the army’s early air dominance.”
In the first ten days of December, more than 100 civilians were killed in drone attacks near El-Obeid. In the city, “satellite imagery from the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab shows the appearance of about 100 new burial mounds in two cemeteries in the two weeks between January 2 and 14. The imagery also shows evidence of bombardment of the city’s power station.”
On November 5, a more severe drone attack occurred on a funeral in al-Luweib village near El-Obeid. “Dozens had gathered from afar for a funeral….soon after a drone followed. The drone, “directed by the RSF, fired on the funeral gathering, killing 65 people, all of them women and children.”
“We were sitting, and all of sudden the drone hit us. I went outside and felt something hitting me and I didn’t know what it was. They told me it was a drone,” said a victim, Safaa Hassan, who had burn marks on her arms and a shrapnel injury on her leg. “The yard was full of [dead] women,” she said.
Victims’ bodies, some of them torn apart by the impact, were later buried in a mass grave.
More recently, in early January, a drone strike killed Abdallah Mohamed Ahmed’s wife, seven of his grandsons, and two other female relatives when it hit the home in El-Obeid they had rented after fleeing their village following an RSF attack.
They are among about 43,000 who fled their homes in North Kordofan and about 65,000 who have fled the region as a whole between late October and December 31…
“We found the children under the rubble, under the iron, under the beds. Only God knows the state of the children,” said Moussa Adam, a neighbor present at the time of the attack.” “They started killing the citizens and terrorizing the citizens.”
The RSF are genocidal kidnappers who have taken over half of Sudan. They deliberately wiped out at least 250,000 people from targeted African ethnic groups in Sudan’s western Darfur region recently.
In January, the U.S. State Department formally declared that the Rapid Support Forces are committing genocide in Sudan. The RSF slaughtered 460 people in a maternity hospital after seizing the city of El Fashir, and killed tens of thousands of people in the city. So many civilians were slaughtered that pools of blood were visible from outer space. Earlier, the RSF militia deliberately shelled a hospital and maternity ward, killing many there. The RSF “fired a missile into a mosque during morning prayers,” reported the New York Times.
