“Dozens of people were killed in the besieged Sudanese city of El Fasher early Friday when paramilitary forces fired a missile into a mosque during morning prayers, local medics and aid workers said,” reports the New York Times:
The strike was among the deadliest in months in El Fasher, in the western region of Darfur, where the paramilitaries have intensified a brutal, nearly 18-month siege by bombing neighborhoods where tens of thousands of hunger-stricken civilians are sheltering.
At least 84 bodies were pulled from the wreckage of the mosque, including several women and children, said Suleman, a senior doctor at the nearby Al Saudi hospital…“The scene was harrowing beyond description,” said Suleman, who asked to be identified by one name to protect his family from reprisals. A missile hit the Al Jamia mosque during early morning prayers, when it was packed with worshipers, the doctor said. Videos circulating on social media of the aftermath, showed bloodied bodies trapped under rubble and steel girders.
Among the dead was Omar Selik, a doctor who spoke with The New York Times last week about the dire conditions for an estimated 260,000 civilians trapped in El Fasher, trying to survive bombardment in a city with vanishingly little food.
The militia that shot a missile into the mosque is the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The RSF has committed genocide against a non-Arab people, the Masalit, in the Darfur region that surrounds the city of El Fasher.
The RSF is reportedly creating a “kill box” for the city of El Fasher. The RSF slaughtered thousands of people in a camp for displaced people nearby, known as Zamzam.
Over a hundred Sudanese people died in shipwrecks last weekend, while trying to escape from Africa to Europe.
Sudan is experiencing a bloody civil war. On one side is a genocidal militia — the Rapid Support Forces. “The RSF and allied militias have systematically murdered men and boys — even infants — on an ethnic basis, and deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence,” says the U.S. State Department. On the other side is Sudan’s military, which has used chemical weapons, and tactics that include “indiscriminate bombing of civilian infrastructure, attacks on schools, markets, and hospitals, and extrajudicial executions,” according to the U.S. Treasury Department.
