Pressmediaofindia
Related Articles
27-03-2025
KHARTOUM: A Sudanese war monitor has accused the military of killing hundreds of people in an air strike on a market in the country’s western Darfur region.
The Emergency Lawyers group which documents abuses by both sides in Sudan’s civil war that erupted in April 2023, said the bombing of Tur’rah market was a “horrific massacre” that had also left hundreds injured.
Videos posted on social media, some by the army’s rival the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group that controls much of Darfur showed the smoking ruins of market stalls and bodies charred beyond recognition.
A military spokesperson denied targeting civilians, saying it only attacked legitimate hostile targets.
Both the Sudanese armed forces and RSF have repeatedly been accused of shelling civilian areas.
The RSF has deployed drones in Darfur, but the army has the warplanes and regularly strikes RSF positions across the region.
The media has not been able to confirm the death toll or the exact date of the attack on the market, which is located about 35km (21 miles) north of the army-held city of el-Fasher.
A Darfur activist group, the Darfur Initiative for Justice and Peace, said it happened on Monday and called it the “deadliest single bombing since the beginning of the war”.
Civilian deaths in bombing and shelling attacks have intensified in recent months with the escalation of fighting in the country’s brutal civil conflict.
Some 12 million Sudanese people have fled their homes since war broke out that is equivalent to Belgium or Tunisia’s entire population.
Famine has taken hold and starvation is widespread, the UN says, with over half the country experiencing “high levels of acute food insecurity”.
Estimates vary, but it is said that at least 150,000 people have been killed by the fighting.
The RSF has denied evidence that it is committing a genocide in Darfur, including the murder of thousands of civilians, and the rape of non-Arab women as a means of “ethnic cleansing”.
Meanwhile, attacks by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and allied militias in El Geneina, the capital city of Sudan’s West Darfur state, from April to November 2023, killed at least thousands of people and left hundreds of thousands as refugees, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The crimes against humanity and widespread war crimes were committed in the context of an ethnic cleansing campaign against the ethnic Massalit and other non-Arab populations in and around El Geneina.
The 218-page report, “‘The Massalit Will Not Come Home’: Ethnic Cleansing and Crimes Against Humanity in El Geneina, West Darfur, Sudan,” documents that the Rapid Support Forces, an independent military force in armed conflict with the Sudan military, and their allied mainly Arab militias, including the Third-Front Tamazuj, an armed group, targeted the predominantly Massalit neighborhoods of El Geneina in relentless waves of attacks from April to June. Abuses escalated again in early November. The attackers committed other serious abuses such as torture, rape, and looting. More than half a million refugees from West Darfur have fled to Chad since April 2023. As of late October 2023, 75 percent were from El Geneina.
“As the UN Security Council and governments wake up to the looming disaster in El Fasher, the large-scale atrocities committed in El Geneina should be seen as a reminder of the atrocities that could come in the absence of concerted action,” said Tirana Hassan, executive director at Human Rights Watch. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
