More than 700 people have been killed in al-Fasher in Sudan’s North Darfur state since May, the United Nations human rights chief said, imploring the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) to end the siege of the town.
The siege and “relentless fighting destroy lives on a massive scale every day,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said in a statement Friday.
“This alarming situation cannot continue. The Rapid Support Forces must end this terrible siege.”
The U.N. rights office said it had documented the deaths of at least 782 civilians and more than 1,143 injured since May, citing evidence based in part on interviews with people who had fled the region. The losses were due to the regular and intensive shelling of densely populated residential areas by the RSF as well as recurring air strikes by the Sudanese armed forces.
Such attacks on civilians could constitute war crimes, the UN human rights office said. Both sides have repeatedly denied intentionally attacking civilians and accused each other of doing so in al-Fasher and surrounding areas.
The Sudanese army, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the RSF, led by his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, have been in conflict for more than 18 months. The war has sparked a severe humanitarian crisis, with more than 12 million people forced from their homes and UN agencies struggling to provide aid.
El-Fasher is one of the most active frontlines between the RSF and the Sudanese army and its allies fighting for a final hold in the Darfur region. Observers fear that an RSF victory there could trigger ethnic retaliation, as happened in West Darfur last year.
WFP worker killed
The city has been subjected to intense attacks over the past week.
Last Friday, nine people were killed and 20 wounded in a paramilitary shelling of the city’s main hospital, the head of the World Health Organization said.
Ten civilians were killed and 20 were injured in further RSF attacks on the hospital and other parts of the city on Wednesday, according to pro-democracy activists.
At least 38 people were killed in a paramilitary drone attack in the city center on Sunday.
The nearby Zamzam camp, where experts say there is famine in a population of more than half a million people, also came under RSF artillery fire in the last two weeks, forcing thousands to leave the camp.
Turk warned that any large-scale attack on Zamzam or el-Fasher would “catapult civilian suffering to catastrophic levels.”
“Every effort must be made, including by the international community, to prevent such an attack and end the siege,” he added.
Fighting continued in other parts of the country. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday condemned the killing of three World Food Program (WFP) workers in an attack a day earlier.
Stephane Dujarric, a spokesman for Guterres, said the agency’s field office in Yabus, Blue Nile state, was hit by an airstrike.
“The Secretary-General condemns all attacks on UN and relief personnel and facilities. He calls for a thorough investigation,” Dujarric said in a statement.
The comments came shortly after the WFP announced the killings in a statement on X expressing “outrage.”
The incident, Dujarric said, “underscores the devastating toll that Sudan’s brutal conflict is taking on millions of people in need and on the humanitarian workers trying to reach them with life-saving assistance.”
He said 2024 would be the “deadliest year on record” for aid workers in Sudan and reiterated calls for an immediate ceasefire.
