Sudan's RSF kills 75 in assault on key Darfur city: rescuers

PORT SUDAN, SUDAN - Sudan's paramilitary Rapid Support Forces killed 75 people in a drone strike on a mosque on Friday as they pressed their assault on the Darfur city of El-Fasher, rescuers said.

El-Fasher is the last major city in the vast western region still under regular army control and the RSF has laid siege to it since May last year.

The drone strike struck worshippers in the city's Al-Daraja neighbourhood, where fleeing residents of the city's famine-hit Abu Shouk displaced persons' camp had sought refuge from the RSF advance.

"The bodies were retrieved from the rubble of the mosque," said a post from the Abu Shouk Emergency Response Room, one of hundreds of volunteer groups coordinating relief across Sudan.

There was no immediate comment on the strike from the RSF, which has been locked in a devastating war with the regular army since April 2023.

The UN human rights office said it was concerned there may have been ethnically-motivated killings of the sort that have increasingly accompanied the fighting with a "devastating impact on the civilian population"

Residents of Al-Daraja combed through the wreckage to find and bury the dead, but said they had run out of shrouds for the bodies.

"We had to use plastic bags," one resident told AFP, using a satellite internet connection to circumvent a communications blackout.

"There are no more shrouds in the city after all this siege and death," he said.

The RSF's siege has caused mass hunger in the city, where families have been surviving on animal feed for months.

KEY BASE FALLS TO RSF

Satellite imagery released by Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab on Thursday showed RSF forces advancing on multiple fronts, including around Abu Shouk camp and the former UN-African Union peacekeeping base.

The base has since been used by the Joint Forces, an alliance of armed groups which has fought alongside the militarysince late 2023 when RSF fighters carried out massacres of the non-Arab Masalit ethnic group in West Darfur state capital El-Geneina, killing between 10,000 and 15,000 people according to UN experts.

The alliance has been key to the city's defences. The city's largest ethnic group, the Zaghawa, see the RSF as an existential threat.

"RSF has likely captured the former UNAMID compound, Joint Forces' base of operations," Yale said, citing damage visible in satellite imagery collected between Monday and Thursday.

An RSF source, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to brief the media, told AFP: "By around 2:00 pm (Thursday), our forces had taken full control of the UNAMID base."

CAMP RESIDENTS FLEE RSF TAKEOVER

Authorities said the advancing paramilitaries had completely overrun Abu Shouk camp, one of several built around El-Fasher to accomodate the millions displaced in a previous Darfur conflict in the 2000s.

According to the United Nations, around 90 percent of the camp's population -- which numbered nearly 200,000 last year -- has fled.

Camp spokesperson Moussa Adam said the RSF had taken control and "positioned their rocket launchers inside the camp".

He told AFP there had been mass killings of civilians, though he could not specify how many.

Buildings near Abu Shouk have been razed, according to Yale's analysis of low-resolution satellite imagery of the area.

The UN human rights office said it was concerned there might have been a repetition of the killings of non-Arab minority groups that accompanied the RSF's capture of Zamzam camp in April.

"Based on these patterns, we fear recurrence of ethnically motivated violence in Abu Shouk camp in El-Fasher," the UN human rights representative for Sudan, Li Fung, told reporters in Geneva.

Now in its third year, the war in Sudan has killed tens of thousands of people and driven some 12 million from their homes.

It has effectively divided the country, with the army controlling the north, east and centre, while the RSF dominates swathes of the south and nearly all of Darfur.