Sudan paramilitary attack kills 18 at El-Fasher market: medic

PORT SUDAN, Sudan: A paramilitary attack on a market in the Sudanese city of El-Fasher killed 18 people, a medical source told AFP on Friday, after world leaders appealed for an end to the country´s wartime suffering.

The Rapid Support Forces´ shelling of the market on Thursday evening also injured dozens, activists said separately, as the paramilitaries and regular army vie for control of the North Darfur state capital, 17 months into their war in the northeast African country.

“We received last night at the hospital 18 dead,” some of them burned and others killed with severe shrapnel injuries, the source at El-Fasher Teaching Hospital told AFP, requesting anonymity for their own protection.

The plight of Sudan, and El-Fasher in particular, has been under discussion this week at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

“We must compel the warring parties to accept humanitarian pauses in El-Fasher, Khartoum and other highly vulnerable areas,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the UN, said on Wednesday.

The Teaching Hospital is one of the last still receiving patients in El-Fasher, where reports of a “full-scale assault” by RSF last weekend led UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to call for an urgent ceasefire.

The paramilitaries have besieged El-Fasher since May, and famine has already been declared in Zamzam refugee camp near the city of two million.

Paramilitary “artillery shelling continued this morning” on residential neighbourhoods and the market, the local resistance committee said on Friday.