Fighting between army, RSF rages in southeastern Sudan

Paramilitary gunfire sounded in Sudan’s southeastern city of Sennar on Monday, a day after shelling blamed on the paramilitaries killed around 30 people at a market, activists and witnesses said.

Sennar is one of the few remaining cities in the state of the same name which is not yet controlled by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), who have been fighting the regular army for more than 16 months.

Residents on Monday told AFP there had been renewed gunfire but whether there were more victims could not be immediately determined.

More than 16 months of war between rival Sudanese generals has already killed thousands of people and triggered what the United Nations calls the world’s worst internal displacement crisis.

Market attack leaves over 30 dead

Since early July the RSF has controlled Sinja, the Sennar state capital.

Sunday’s market shelling came a day after Sudan’s foreign ministry, which is loyal to the army, rejected a call by independent UN experts for an “impartial force with a mandate to safeguard civilians” to be deployed “without delay.”

The Sudanese Emergency Lawyers’ group, which documents atrocities committed during the war, reported 31 civilians killed and 100 wounded in the market attack.

An earlier toll on Sunday evening from the Sudan Doctors Network, which blamed the RSF, said 21 people died and around 70 others were wounded at the market.

New unrest in El-Fasher

Elsewhere in Sennar, Emergency Lawyers reported that strikes by the Sudanese Armed Forces killed four people including children, leaving a total of 35 people dead in the state by both warring sides in “artillery fire and blind strikes.”

New unrest was also reported in El-Fasher city, which the RSF have besieged for months in the vast western Darfur region.

Darfur governor Mini Minawi said on social media platform X that the paramilitaries had “attacked” El-Fasher including with drones.

The war, raging since April 2023, pits the army under Sudan’s de facto leader General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan against the RSF led by his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.

Attack on village kills 80 people

In late June, the RSF seized Sinja, the capital of Sennar state.

The state connects central Sudan to the army-controlled southeast where hundreds of thousands of people have sought refuge.

In August, a paramilitary attack in Sennar’s Jalgini village killed at least 80 people, a local hospital source said at the time.

Independent experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council said on Friday that their fact-finding mission had uncovered “harrowing” violations by both sides, “which may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.”‘

Independent impartial force’

They called for “an independent and impartial force” to be deployed as soon as possible to protect Sudanese civilians – a proposal ruled out by the Burhan-aligned government in a statement issued late on Saturday.

“The Sudanese government rejects in their entirety the recommendations of the UN mission,” the foreign ministry said.

“The protection of civilians remains an absolute priority for the Sudanese government,” the statement added.

On Monday, Human Rights Watch warned that the “warring parties responsible for widespread war crimes and other atrocities… have newly acquired foreign-made weapons and military equipment.”

Arms embargo

“The United Nations Security Council should renew and expand the arms embargo and its restrictions on the Darfur region to all of Sudan and hold violators to account,” the New York-based rights group said ahead of a meeting of the council’s Sudan committee on Wednesday.

Visiting Sudan on Sunday, World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said: “The scale of the emergency is shocking, as is the insufficient action being taken to curtail the conflict and respond to the suffering it is causing.”