Sudan: at least 13 civilians killed in an attack on a mosque in El-Fasher
In Sudan, at least 13 civilians were killed on Wednesday, October 8, in an attack on a mosque in the Abou Chouk neighborhood of El-Fasher, the last major city in Darfur still outside the full control of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
A survivor said 20 people were injured and that 70 families had taken refuge in the mosque after the paramilitaries stormed their homes. “After the shelling attack, we pulled 13 bodies from the rubble and buried them,” a witness said.
In just twenty-four hours, the violence killed at least 33 people in the city, which has been besieged for eighteen months. On Tuesday, the city’s maternity ward had already been hit by a drone strike, killing eight and injuring seven, according to anonymous medical sources.
The next day, a new assault claimed the lives of at least 12 people, including a doctor and a nurse, and left 17 wounded. In mid-September, a previous attack on a mosque had killed at least 75 people.
Since August, the RSF have stepped up artillery fire and drone strikes to take control of the city, succeeding in occupying several neighborhoods and reducing the last strongholds of the regular army. According to satellite images analyzed by the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale University, El-Fasher is encircled by nearly 68 kilometers of embankments, with a single exit corridor of 3 to 4 kilometers.
More than one million people have fled the city since the start of the conflict, representing 10% of Sudanese displaced people, according to the UN. The local population has dropped by about 62%, falling from over one million to 413,000 inhabitants, according to the International Organization for Migration. Daily strikes are forcing many residents to take shelter in makeshift shelters dug into courtyards.
After more than a year under siege, the city is almost out of resources: even animal feed, used as a last resort, has become scarce and very expensive. The war in Sudan has already caused tens of thousands of deaths, millions of displaced people, and prompted what the UN calls “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.”