Sudan paramilitaries kill 14 civilians fleeing besieged city: monitor

Eyewitness News

2 days ago

KHARTOUM - udanese paramilitary fighters have killed at least 14 civilians trying to flee a besieged city in Darfur, a rights group said Monday, more than 27 months into their war against the army.
The attack in a village on the outskirts of El-Fasher came just two days after the administration installed by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) had called on civilians to evacuate the besieged city and promised they would be safe.
The Emergency Lawyers, a rights group which has documented atrocities in the war between the RSF and the Sudanese army, said that 14 people had been killed in the Saturday attack, "dozens more were injured and an unknown number of civilians detained".
"The victims had left El-Fasher in an attempt to escape the siege and escalating battles," the group said.
AFP was not immediately able to verify the toll and details, with Darfur under a communications blackout and largely inaccessible to journalists.
The RSF has in recent days launched its latest assault on El-Fasher, the North Darfur state capital which it has besieged since May 2024 but has been unable to seize from the hands of the army.
The UN has repeatedly warned of the plight of an estimated one million people trapped in El-Fasher and its surrounding displacement camps with virtually no aid or services.
Families have survived on animal feed, a shortage of which was announced last week by local authorities.
Since April 2023, the war between the army and the RSF has killed tens of thousands, torn the country apart, and created what the UN has called the world's largest hunger and displacement crises.
If the RSF captures El-Fasher, it will control all of Sudan's vast western region of Darfur and, along with its allies, much of the country's south.
EVACUATION CALL
On Thursday, the RSF's political administration urged El-Fasher residents to evacuate to Qarni village, where the Emergency Lawyers said the civilians had been killed.
"I call on you to leave El-Fasher and head to Qarni, the northwest gate of the city, where our forces and the Tasis alliance forces are located and will ensure your safety," the RSF-appointed Darfur governor Al-Hadi Idris had said in a video address.
Tasis is an RSF-led political alliance which late last month named leaders of a government based in South Darfur state capital Nyala.
The RSF government has received no international recognition, and the African Union has called on its members to "not recognise the so-called 'parallel government'".
Idris said RSF allies would offer safe passage to areas including the western town of Tawila, "just as the forces have secured thousands of people who left El-Fasher in the past six months".
In Tawila, the UN says hundreds of thousands are currently facing a devastating cholera outbreak after surviving RSF attacks on the displacement camps that surround El-Fasher in April.
Both the army and the RSF have been repeatedly accused of war crimes, including targeting civilians and the indiscriminate shelling of residential areas.
But the RSF has been specifically accused of atrocities including laying siege to and burning entire villages and displacement camps, systematic sexual violence and genocide in its ethnically motivated attacks in Darfur.