KHARTOUM, Sudan: Fighting between rival Sudanese forces including air strikes on the capital Khartoum have killed at least thirty-three civilians, pro-democracy lawyers said on Friday.
Sudan has been gripped by nearly 9 months of war pitting army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan against his former deputy, paramilitary commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.
The war has claimed at least 12,190 lives according to a conservative estimate by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project, and the United Nations (UN) says more than 7 million people have been displaced.
Aerial bombing in south Khartoum
On Thursday, 23 civilians were killed and several more injured by aerial bombing in south Khartoum’s Soba district, the Emergency Lawyers group said, accusing the military which maintains control of the skies, according to AFP.
The lawyer group confirmed ten other deaths in artillery attacks, also in southern Khartoum.
A local group known as a resistance committee had reported the same toll, saying that ten civilians were killed by artillery fire in the local market and residential areas.
The focus of the war, which started in mid-April in the capital, has shifted south and recently reached Sudan’s Al-Jazira state where hundreds of thousands of people had sought refuge.
The streets of the war-ravaged capital, where war continues, are controlled by Daglo’s Rapid Support Forces, while Burhan’s administration still puts out statements as the Sudanese government.
The RSF also holds nearly all of the western Darfur region, and in December last month pressed deeper into Al-Jazira state, shattering one of the country’s few remaining sanctuaries.
The resistance committees, which have provided help during the war, had staged pro-democracy protests before a 2021 coup by Burhan and Daglo derailed the country’s democratic transition. The two generals then fell out, leading to fighting.
Daglo toured several African capitals since late December in his first foreign visit since the start of the war.
In Addis Ababa, he inked a declaration with the former Sudanese prime minister Abdalla Hamdok in what observers say was a bid to position himself as a key interlocutor.
