Artillery bombings and air strikes killed at least 56 people in the Grand Khartoum on Saturday, according to a medical source and activists, the last bloodshed in the devastating war of Sudan.
The regular army of Sudan and the rapid paramilitary forces (RSF) have been enclosed in a battle for power since April 2023 which has been intensifying this month with the fighting army to regain control of the capital.
According to a Greater Khartoum, an RSF bombardment killed 54 and injured 158 people in a busy market in Omdurman, controlled by the army, part of the Grand Khartoum, crushing the Al-Nao hospital in the city.
“The shells struck in the middle of the vegetable market, which is why the victims and the injured are so much,” said a survivor AFP.
The RSF denied having made the attack, which, according to doctors of the French medical charitable, said that doctors of the Medical Bedding Organization (MSF) caused a “total carnage” in the hospital .
Through the Nile in Khartoum, two civilians were killed and dozens injured in an air strike in an area controlled by the RSF, said the local emergency intervention room, one of the hundreds of groups of volunteers coordinating Emergency care through Sudan.
Although the RSF used drones during attacks, including on Saturday, the regular hunting planes of the regular armed forces maintain a monopoly on the air strikes.
The RSF and the army have both been accused on several occasions of having targeted civilians and bombing the residential areas without discrimination.
In addition to killing tens of thousands of people, the war has uprooted more than 12 million and decimated the fragile infrastructure of Sudan, forcing most health establishments.
Meters from the hospital
MSF secretary general, Chris Lockyear, was at Al-Nao hospital on Saturday, where he said that “the morgue is full of corpses”.
“I can see the lives of torn men, women and children, with injured people lying in all possible emergency spaces while doctors do what they can,” he said in a statement.
A volunteer in the hospital said AFP He was facing disastrous shortages of “camerages, blood donors and civilians to transport the wounded”.
Al-Nao, one of the last medical facilities operating in Omdurman, has been attacked several times.
According to the Sudanese Doctors’ Union, a shell fell “a few meters” from the hospital.
The union said most of the victims were women and children and called nurses and doctors in the region to get to the hospital to relieve a “serious shortage of medical staff”.
The fighting in the capital occurs weeks after the army launched an offensive through the Central Sudan, recovering the capital of the state of Al-Jazira Wad Madani before targeting Khartoum.
The RSF has since remained in road control between Wad Madani and Khartoum, but on Saturday, a militia combined by the army claimed control of the cities of Tamboul, Rufaa, Al-Hasaheisa and Al-Hilaliya, some 125 kilometers ( 77 miles) south-east of the southeast, about 125 kilometers (77 miles) south-east of the capital.
The group, Sudan Shield Forces, is led by Abu Aqla Kaykal, who defeated the RSF last year and was accused of atrocities against civilians both during his mandate with the RSF and now on the side of the army.
Sudan is actually divided, the RSF controls almost all of the vast western region of Darfur and the southern expanses, and the army controlling the east and the north of the country.
Counter-offensive
After months of dead end in the Grand Khartoum, the army broke the RSF seats on several bases of the capital, including its head office, growing more and more the periphery of the city.
Witnesses said that the bombing of Omdurman on Saturday came from the western outskirts of the city, where the RSF remains in control.
He came a day after the RSF commander, Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, promised to take over the capital.
“We have already expelled them (from Khartoum), and we will expel them again,” he told troops in a rare video address.
The great Khartoum was a key battlefield in almost 22 months of fighting between the army and the RSF, and was reduced to a shell of its old self.
An investigation by the London School in hygiene and tropical medicine revealed that 26,000 people had been killed in the capital alone between April 2023 and June 2024.
Wonderful districts have been taken over by combatants while at least 3.6 million civilians fled, according to the United Nations.
Persons incapable or reluctant to leave reported frequent artillery fires in residential areas and generalized hunger in the besieged districts blocked by opposing forces.
It is estimated that at least 106,000 people suffer from famine in Khartoum, according to the integrated classification of the integrated uninituated food security phase, with an additional 3.2 million of the crisis hunger.
Nationally, famine has been declared in five areas – most of them in Darfur – and should attack five more by May.
