Activists speak of more than 70 dead in two days of fighting in Sudan

Four children were among 20 people killed in an army airstrike in the capital Khartoum on Tuesday, Sudanese volunteer rescuers said, adding to dozens killed in Al-Jazeera state since Sunday .

The strike injured 27 people, including women and children, and left the bodies “charred”, according to Khartoum’s South Belt Emergency Response Service (ERR), one of hundreds of volunteer groups led by young people.

In Al-Jazeera state, just south of Khartoum, violent clashes broke out on Sunday after a paramilitary commander joined the army, killing more than 50 people, activists said.

An army airstrike on a mosque in the state capital of Wad Madani on Sunday killed 31 people, the local resistance committee said in a statement to AFP Tuesday.

The ERRs and resistance committees have been coordinating life-saving aid to civilians caught in the crossfire since war broke out between the regular Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in April 2023.

The Wad Madani committee accused the army of using “barrel bombs”, adding that more than half of those killed in the mosque attack were still unidentified as rescuers searched through the remains “dozens of charred and mutilated bodies”.

In the state’s war-ravaged east, activists said at least 20 people had been killed in paramilitary attacks since Sunday.

Across the country, the war has killed tens of thousands of people and created the world’s largest displacement and humanitarian crises.

Rival armed forces are engaged in fighting over Al-Jazeera state, Sudan’s pre-war breadbasket, which has been under paramilitary control since late last year.

“Vengeful” attacks

On Sunday, the army announced that the RSF’s Al-Jazeera commander, Abu Aqla Kaykal, had abandoned the paramilitary force, taking “a large number of his forces” with him, in what it said was the first defection highly publicized at his side.

A spokesman for army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan said Kaykal and others who defect would be given “amnesty” as war-weary civilians prepare for attacks. reprisals.

Just hours after the army took control of Tamboul, 75 kilometers north of Wad Madani, witnesses reported that RSF troops were once again “unleashed” in the town.

They said the paramilitary fighters “fired randomly into the air” and forced civilians to take away looted goods.

On Tuesday, the RSF “repulsed an attempt by the army” to retake the town of Tamboul, a paramilitary source said. AFPrequesting anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Both sides have been accused of war crimes, including targeting civilians, indiscriminate bombing of residential areas and blocking or looting aid.

The RSF and its allied militias have also been accused of ethnic killings and using rape as a weapon of war.

In the town of Rufaa, just 50 kilometers north of the state capital, the local resistance committee said on Tuesday that paramilitary attacks on a series of villages in eastern Al-Jazeera caused at least 20 dead.

Activists accused the paramilitaries of carrying out “revenge operations against defenseless civilians” in response to Kaykal’s defection.

According to the Central Observatory for Human Rights, a volunteer group, at least seven towns and villages have been hit by “vengeful attacks that pay no attention to the rights of civilians in wartime.”