PORT SUDAN: Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Sup­port Forces (RSF) killed 75 people in a drone strike on a mosque on Friday as they pressed their assault on the Darfur city of El-Fasher.

El-Fasher is the last major city in the vast western region still under regular army control and the RSF has laid siege to it since May last year.

The drone strike struck worshippers in the city’’ Al Daraja neighbourhood, where fleeing residents of the city’s famine-hit Abu Shouk displaced persons’ camp had sought refuge from the RSF advance.

“The bodies were retrieved from the rubble of the mosque,” said a post from a rescue agency one of hundreds of volunteer groups coordinating relief across Sudan.

The RSF has been locked in a devastating war with the regular army since April 2023.

The UN human rights office said it was concerned there may have been ethnically-motivated killings of the sort that have increasingly accompanied the fighting with a “devastating impact on the civilian population”.

Residents of Al Daraja combed through the wreckage to find and bury the dead, but said they had run out of shrouds for the bodies. “We had to use plastic bags,” one resident said, using a satellite internet connection to circumvent a communications blackout.

“There are no more shrouds in the city after all this siege and death,” he said.

The RSF’s siege has caused mass hunger in the city, where families have been surviving on animal feed for months.

Key base falls to RSF

Satellite imagery released by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab on Thursday showed RSF forces advancing on multiple fronts, including around Abu Shouk camp and the former UN-African Union peacekeeping base.

The base has since been used by the Joint Forces, an alliance of armed groups which has fought alongside the military since late 2023 against RSF fighters.

The alliance has been key to the city’s defences. The city’s largest ethnic group, the Zaghawa, see the RSF as an existential threat.

Published in Dawn, September 20th, 2025