Artillery bombings and air attacks killed at least 56 people in Greater Jartum on Saturday, according to a medical source and activists, the last bloodshed in the devastating Sudan War.
The Regular Sudan Army and the Paramilitary Fast Support forces (RSF) have been locked in a battle for power since April 2023 that has intensified this month with the army that struggles to recover control of the capital.
The RSF bombing killed 54 and wounded 158 people in a market occupied in OMDURMAN-controlled by the Army, part of Greater Jartum, overwhelming the Al-Nao hospital in the city, according to a medical source and the Ministry of Health.
“The shells beaten in the middle of the vegetable market, so the victims and the injured are so many,” said a survivor to AFP.
The RSF denied having carried out the attack, that the doctors of French medical charity without borders (MSF) said caused “total carnage” in the hospital.
On the other side of the Nile, in Jardum proper, two civilians died and dozens injured in an air strike in an area controlled by RSF, the local emergency response room said, one of the hundreds of groups of volunteers who coordinate the attention of the attention of Emergency in Sudan.
Although the RSF has used drones in attacks, even on Saturday, the combat planes of the regular armed forces maintain a monopoly in air attacks.
Both the RSF and the Army have been repeatedly accused of attacking civilians and indiscriminately disburseing residential areas.
In addition to killing tens of thousands of people, the war has uprooted more than 12 million and decimated the fragile Sudan infrastructure, forcing most health centers out of service.
Meters from the hospital
The secretary general of MSF, Chris Lockyar, was at the Al-Nao hospital on Saturday, where he said that “the morgue is full of corpses.”
“I can see the life of shattered men, women and children, with injured people who are in all possible spaces in the emergency room as doctors do what they can,” he said in a statement.
A hospital volunteer told him AFP He faced a serious shortage of “covers, blood donors and stretchers to transport the injured.”
Al-Nao, one of the latest medical facilities operating in Omdurman, has been repeatedly attacked.
According to the Sudanese doctors union, a shell fell “only meters away” from the hospital.
The union said that most of the victims were women and children, and asked nurses and doctors in the area to go to the hospital to relieve a “serious shortage of medical staff.”
The fight in the capital arrives weeks after the army launched an offensive in the center of Sudan, claiming the capital of the state of Al-Jazira, Wad Madani, before establishing its sights in Jartum.
Since then, the RSF has remained in control of the road between Wad Madani and Jartum, but on Saturday a militia allied by the army demanded control of the cities of Tamouul, Rufaa, Al-Hahasa and Al-Hilaliya, about 125 kilometers ( 77 miles) southeast of the capital.
The group, the forces of the Sudan shield, is directed by Abu Aqla Kaykal, who defected from the RSF last year and has been accused of atrocities against civilians both during his mandate with the RSF and now on the side of the army.
Sudan remains effectively divided, with the RSF in control of almost the entire western region of Darfur and Swathes of the South, and the army that controls the east and north of the country.
Counteroffensive
After months of stagnation in Greater Jartum, the army has broken the rsf sieges in several bases of the capital, including its headquarters, pushing paramilitaries on the outskirts of the city.
The witnesses said that the OMDURMAN bombardment on Saturday came from the Western outskirts of the city, where the RSF is still in control.
He arrived a day after the RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo promised to resume the capital.
“We expel them (from Jardum) before, and we will expel them again,” he told the troops in a rare video address.
Greater Jartum has been a key battlefield in almost 22 months of struggle between the army and the RSF, and has been reduced to a shell of his former self.
An investigation by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found that 26,000 people were killed only in the capital between April 2023 and June 2024.
The fighters have assumed the position of entire neighborhoods, while at least 3.6 million civilians have fled, according to the United Nations.
Those who cannot want to leave have reported a frequent artillery fire in residential areas and generalized hunger in besieged neighborhoods blocked by opposite forces.
It is estimated that at least 106,000 people suffer from famine in Jartum, according to the non -supported food security phase classification, with another 3.2 million that experience levels of crisis hunger.
Nationally, the famine has declared in five areas, most of them in Darfur, and is expected to take over five more for May.
