PORT SUDAN: A Sudanese network of volunteer rescuers said on Sunday the military carried out an air strike a day earlier on a marketplace in Khartoum, leaving 23 people dead.

The market is near one of the main camps in the Sudanese capital, where the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been fighting the military as part of a civil war that has killed tens of thousands of people.

“Twenty-three people were confirmed dead and more than 40 others wounded” and taken to hospital after “military air strikes on Saturday afternoon on the main market” in southern Khartoum, the youth-led Emergency Response Rooms said in a post on Facebook.

Fierce fighting has raged since Friday around Khartoum, much of which is controlled by the RSF, with the military pounding the centre and south of the city from the air.

The military is advancing towards Khartoum from nearby Omdurman, where clashes erupted on Saturday, eyewitnesses said.

World’s largest displacement crisis

Since April 2023, when war broke out between army chief Abdel Fattah al Burhan and his former deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, the paramilitaries had largely pushed the army out of Khartoum.

The World Health Organisation says at least 20,000 people have been killed in the civil war, but some estimates put the toll much higher at up to 150,000.

The war has also created the world’s largest displacement crisis, the UN says. More than 10 million people, around a fifth of Sudan’s population, have been forced from their homes, according to UN figures.

A UN-backed assessment in August declared a famine in the Zamzam refugee camp in Darfur near the city of El Fasher.

The government loyal to the army is based in Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast, where the army has retained control. The RSF meanwhile has taken control of nearly all of the vast western region of Darfur, rampaged through the agricultural heartland of central Sudan and pushed into the army-controlled southeast.

Published in Dawn, October 14th, 2024