A drone strike by Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) killed at least 75 people on Friday at a mosque inside a displaced persons camp near El-Fasher, local rescuers reported. The attack underscores the heavy toll on civilians as Sudan’s vicious civil war extends and intensifies, the United Nations warned.
The strike struck Abu Shouk camp, just outside the North Darfur capital, said the Emergency Response Room, a volunteer group coordinating relief. "The bodies were retrieved from the rubble of the mosque," the group said in a statement.
El-Fasher has been under paramilitary siege for about 18 months and is the last army-held city in Darfur, where Sudan’s army has been fighting the RSF since April 2023.
The fall of the city would hand the RSF full control of the region, already plagued by mass atrocities and ethnically targeted killings, the UN and human rights groups say.
Satellite imagery from Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab shows RSF units advancing from multiple directions, including around Abu Shouk camp and the former UNAMID peacekeeping base, now held by anti-RSF Joint Forces.
Communications remain cut, making it difficult to verify casualties or deliver aid.
The UN human rights office reported a worrying surge in civilian deaths in the first half of the year.
“Every day we are receiving more reports of horrors on the ground,” Li Fung from OHCHR Sudan told reporters in Geneva. At least 3,384 civilians were killed from January to June, most of them in Darfur.
The war, now in its third year, has killed tens of thousands, displaced nearly 12 million people, and created the largest hunger and displacement crises worldwide, according to the UN
