PORT SUDAN: Paramilitary shelling of a famine-hit displacement camp near North Darfur’s besieged capital of El-Fasher killed six people on Wednesday, activists in Sudan said.
The Rapid Support Forces (RSF), locked in a brutal conflict with the regular army since April 2023, pressed an attack on the Abu Shouk camp, said the local resistance committee, one of hundreds of volunteer groups coordinating aid across Sudan.
Wednesday’s shelling came a day after the group reported 80 casualties from artillery fire on Tuesday, although it could not confirm the exact numbers of dead and wounded.
The RSF assault on the camp began on Sunday, the second day of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan in the northeast African country.
Civilians had been shopping for Ramadan supplies when shells hit the camp and a crowded market nearby, killing six people, rescuers said.
The attacks come as the RSF keeps up its months-long siege of El-Fasher, the last state capital in the vast western region of Darfur still under army control.
Fighting around the city has seen the army and allied forces repel repeated paramilitary attacks as civilians bear the brunt of relentless shelling.
The RSF holds nearly all of Darfur while the army controls the country’s east and north and has this year made gains in the capital Khartoum and central Sudan.
The war has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people and uprooted more than 12 million, making it the “biggest humanitarian crisis ever recorded,” according to the International Rescue Committee.
In North Darfur alone, nearly 1.7 million people are displaced.
Around two million people face extreme food insecurity, and 320,000 are already suffering famine conditions, according to UN estimates.
Famine has hit three displacement camps around El-Fasher — Zamzam, Abu Shouk and Al-Salam — and is expected to spread to five more areas, including El-Fasher itself, by May.