PORT SUDAN: Clashes between Sudanese paramilitaries and the regular army have killed at least 57 civilians in the besieged Darfur city of El-Fasher, a medical source and a volunteer aid group said on Thursday.

The local resistance committee, a grassroots aid group, said the civilians were killed on Wednesday in clashes and shelling of the city by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, at war with the army since April 2023.

The violence came just days after the RSF killed more than 400 people in attacks on North Darfur’s capital of El-Fasher and nearby displacement camps, according to the United Nations. El-Fasher, which the RSF has besieged for nearly a year, is the last major urban stronghold in Darfur still under army control.

It is a strategic target for the paramilitary group, which has sought to consolidate its hold on Darfur following the army’s recapture of the capital Khartoum last month. In an earlier statement, the army put Wednesday’s death toll at 62, including 15 children ages three to 10, and several wounded.

It said it had repelled the “fierce” assault on the city’s east in a coordinated response with “allied armed movements, intelligence services, the police” and volunteer fighters. El-Fasher has been defended in large part by a coalition of army-allied groups known as the Joint Forces.

Since Sudan’s army retook Khartoum last month, Red Crescent volunteers have been working to collect and clear the bodies littering the streets of the war-ravaged capital. Aida El Sayed, head of the Sudan Red Crescent, said the organisation’s volunteers were finding bodies “in the street, inside the buildings, everywhere”.

She said it remained unclear how many bodies are still lying out in the open in Khartoum. But during just one day, she said Red Crescent volunteers had found “250 in one street”.

Since April 2023, the conflict has pitted army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan against his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who heads the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

Published in Dawn, April 18th, 2025