Witnesses reported that the streets of a district in Sudan’s capital were strewn with corpses on Thursday, while the United Nations voiced concern over the intensifying conflict in Darfur between the army and RSF.
“The bodies of people in military uniforms are lying in the streets of the city centre after the fighting yesterday,” a witness in Omdurman, situated across the Nile River from Khartoum, reported to media via telephone.
Other witnesses corroborated her account. One of them mentioned that a woman employed at Al-Nau hospital in the north of Omdurman lost her life when a shell struck the last functioning medical facility in the vicinity.
Since April, the armed forces loyal to army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan have been engaged in warfare against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by Commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.
Fierce combat persisted in Khartoum and its environs, along with the expansive western region of Darfur, where some of the deadliest clashes have occurred.
The RSF has claimed control of all but one major city in Darfur.
However there are renewed concerns of ethnically motivated violence breaking out.
“Hundreds of thousands of civilians and displaced people are now in great danger in El Fasher, North Darfur, with a fast deteriorating security situation, lack of food and water and very poor services,” the UN’s deputy humanitarian coordinator for Darfur, Toby Harward, wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
“If the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese army fight for control of the city, it will have devastating impact on civilians,” he added.
Since hostilities erupted on April 15 between forces loyal to Burhan and Daglo, over 10,000 people have lost their lives in Sudan, as per a conservative estimate from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project.
Approximately six million individuals have been displaced from their residences, as indicated by United Nations figures.
A significant number have sought refuge outside the country’s borders, prompting the United Nations to declare on Thursday that it is “sounding the alarm” regarding the volume of individuals fleeing to South Sudan.
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric reported a 50 percent surge in arrivals between September and October.
Over 366,000 individuals have migrated south since the commencement of the war, he noted, expressing concern that the southward expansion of the conflict may lead to additional displacement and strain an already overstretched humanitarian response.
