PORT SUDAN: At least 176 people were killed in two days of army and paramilitary strikes across Sudan, according to tolls provided by officials, activists and lawyers on Tuesday.

In Omdurman, part of the Sudanese capital, paramilitary shelling killed at least 65 people and wounded hundreds on Tuesday, according to the state’s army-aligned governor.

A single shell on a passenger bus “killed everyone on board and turned 22 people into body parts”, said Khartoum governor Ahmed Othman Hamza.

He attributed the strike to “the terrorist militia”, in reference to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, at war with the army since April 2023.

The attack comes a day after an army air strike on a market in the North Darfur town of Kabkabiya killed over 100 people, the pro-democracy Emergency Lawyers reported on Tuesday.

Half of Darfur’s population displaced amid army and paramilitary fight across the country

“The air strike took place on the town’s weekly market day, where residents from various nearby villages had gathered to shop, resulting in the death of more than 100 people and injury of hundreds, including women and children,” said the lawyers’ group, which has been documenting human rights abuses during the conflict.

The lawyers also reported six people were killed in North Kordofan state when a drone that had crashed on Nov 26 exploded.

In the famine-stricken Zamzam displacement camp in North Darfur, paramilitary shelling on Tuesday killed five people, according to civil society group the Darfur General Coordination of Camps for the Displaced and Refugees.

A UN-backed report in July declared famine had taken hold in the camp after a months-long RSF siege of state capital El-Fasher and the surrounding area.

Worst fighting in months

The war between the RSF and the regular army has so far killed tens of thousands, uprooted 12 million and created what the United Nations has called the worst humanitarian crisis in recent memory.

It has also nearly destroyed Khartoum, control over which both sides have not managed to claim.

Most of Omdurman — the capital’s twin city across the Nile — is under army control, while the RSF holds Khartoum North (Bahri) to the east.

Residents have continuously reported shelling across the river, with bombs and shrapnel regularly striking homes on both banks.

On Tuesday, eyewitnesses said artillery was striking Omdurman from multiple fronts.

“We haven’t seen bombing this intense in six months,” one eyewitness to the passenger bus shelling said.

Another reported shelling from the Wadi Seidna army base, in northern Omdurman, towards RSF positions in western Omdurman and across the river in Bahri.

The army currently controls parts of the capital, as well as the country’s north and east. The RSF has seized nearly the entire vast western region of Darfur, swathes of the southern Kordofan region and much of central Sudan.

Published in Dawn, December 11th, 2024