The attacks came after six straight days of RSF drone strikes on the Army-led government’s wartime capital Port Sudan damaged key infrastructure including the power grid and the country’s last operational civilian airport.
On Friday evening, at least 14 members of the same family were killed in an air strike on a displacement camp in the vast western region of Darfur, a rescue group said, blaming the paramilitaries.
The Abu Shouk camp “was the target of intense bombardment by the Rapid Support Forces on Friday evening”, said the group of volunteer aid workers, which also reported wounded.
“Fourteen Sudanese, members of the same family, were killed” and several people wounded, it said in a statement.
The camp near El-Fasher, the last state capital in Darfur still out of the RSF’s control, is plagued by famine, according to the United Nations.
It is home to tens of thousands of people who fled the violence of successive conflicts in Darfur and the conflict that has been tearing Africa’s third largest country apart since 2023.
The RSF has shelled the camp several times in recent weeks.
Abu Shouk is located near the Zamzam camp, which the RSF seized in April after a devastating offensive that virtually emptied it.
Drone attacks
The United Nations says nearly one million people had been sheltering at the site.
On Saturday, an RSF strike on a prison in the army-controlled southern city of El-Obeid killed at least 19 people and wounded 45, a medical source said.
The source told AFP that the jail in the North Kordofan state capital was hit by an RSF drone.
Elsewhere on Saturday, army warplanes struck RSF positions in the Darfur cities of Nyala and El-Geneina, destroying arms depots and military equipment, a military source said.
This week, the RSF said it had taken the strategic town of En Nahud in West Kordofan, a key army supply line to Darfur.
Sudan’s army-aligned authorities accuse the United Arab Emirates of supplying drones to the RSF, which has no air force of its own.
The war — which began as a power struggle between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo — has killed tens of thousands, displaced more than 13 million people and triggered what the United Nations calls one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters.
It has effectively divided the country in two with the army controlling the north, east and centre while the RSF and its allies dominate nearly all of Darfur in the west and parts of the south.
Both sides have been accused of committing war crimes.
Published – May 11, 2025 02:23 am IST