Wad Madani, Sudan, Sept 13 (AFP/APP):An air raid on Sudan’s war-ravaged Darfur region killed at least 40 civilians on Wednesday, according to a medical source, as the head of the UN mission to the country resigned.
Volker Perthes, who has been “persona non grata” by Sudanese authorities since June, warned the United Nations Security Council again, in his final briefing before leaving the post, that Sudan’s war risks further deterioration.
“Forty civilians have been killed in an air strike that hit two markets and a number of the city’s neighbourhoods,” the medical source told AFP from a hospital in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur. The source asked for anonymity out of security concerns.
Since battles began on April 15 between the regular army, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) commanded by Burhan’s former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, nearly 7,500 people have been killed, according to a conservative estimate from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.
More than five million people have been uprooted, including one million who fled across borders, according to UN figures.
– Intensified fighting –
Witnesses in Nyala had reported earlier on Wednesday air strikes falling on two markets and causing civilian casualties in Sudan’s second-biggest city.
The western region of Darfur — the size of France and home to a quarter of Sudan’s population — had already seen some of the war’s worst unrest before violence intensified last month.
Over 10 days in August, more than 50,000 people fled the city, according to the UN.
In early September, those who remained looked up to see a new escalation: air force fighter jets — whose strikes have been largely limited to the capital Khartoum — flying overhead.
Their bombs struck both RSF bases and the residential neighbourhoods they inhabit, witnesses told AFP.
The army maintains control of the skies and has been accused of repeated indiscriminate shelling of residential areas where paramilitaries have embedded themselves, including by evicting families and taking over homes.
Positioning themselves in civilian-occupied neighbourhoods and buildings is “a potential violation of the Geneva Conventions,” the US-supported Sudan Conflict Observatory has said.
It added that the Sudanese Armed Forces “would still be required to ensure that civilian harm is minimised regardless of whether a target has been made a legitimate military target.”
Wednesday’s attack came a day after a medical source reported 17 civilians killed in Khartoum’s sister city of Omdurman. Witnesses described that attack as RSF shelling.
On Sunday, at least 51 people were killed and dozens wounded in air strikes on southern Khartoum, according to UN human rights chief Volker Turk.
The medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) called it “the deadliest weekend witnessed by our teams in Khartoum since the beginning of the conflict, five months ago.”
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