KHARTOUM: Shelling by Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces killed at least seven people and wounded 71 others in El-Fasher, a medical source said Sunday, as the paramilitary group launched its fiercest offensive yet on the besieged city.
El-Fasher, the last major city in the vast western Darfur region still under army control, has become the most violent front line in the war between the Sudanese army and the RSF, which erupted in April 2023.
In recent weeks, paramilitary forces have escalated their long-running siege, launching fierce artillery barrages and ground incursions into densely populated neighborhoods, the city’s airport and the famine-hit Abu Shouk displacement camp.
The few hospitals still operational have been repeatedly bombarded and the local police headquarters captured by the RSF.
The medical source, who requested anonymity for safety reasons, said the true toll from Saturday’s attack was “likely higher,” as many injured had been unable to reach the hospital due to the intensity of the RSF’s strikes.
Among the wounded, mostly suffering from shrapnel injuries, 22 were reported to be in a critical condition, according to the source, who was reached via satellite Internet to bypass a communications blackout.
Local activists said the attack struck several neighborhoods in the city’s west near the airport, which RSF forces have sought to capture.
The RSF, which evolved from the Janjaweed Arab militias accused of genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s, is seeking to wrest full control of the region from the army after being pushed out of the capital Khartoum earlier this year.
Satellite imagery from Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab revealed Thursday that the RSF had constructed more than 31 kilometers of berms — raised earth barriers — “creating a literal kill box” in the city, the report said.
Its imagery also identified munitions impact damage at the city’s water authority, which supplies El-Fasher with fresh drinking water.
Nathaniel Raymond, the lab’s executive director, said the RSF had confined the Sudanese army and its allied militias to less than five square kilometers in the city.
“It’s the smallest it’s been since the siege began,” he told AFP.
The besieged population — estimated by the UN at some 300,000 — has endured severe shortages of water and food for over a year, according to humanitarian workers.
Famine was officially declared in three displacement camps around El-Fasher last year, and the UN warned it could spread to the city itself by last May.
A lack of data has so far prevented an official declaration of famine, but the UN estimates that nearly 40 percent of children under five are acutely malnourished, with 11 percent severely so.
Many have resorted to eating animal fodder, while desperate attempts to escape into the desert often end in death from exposure, starvation or violence.
“The pattern of life is ending,” said Raymond.
“They are dying in poverty, crossfire and bombardment and they’re being killed as they’re trying to leave,” he added.
Yale’s satellite images show that cemeteries had been expanded over the past months.
“The most worrisome part will be when there’s no one left to dig the graves anymore.”
The RSF, which recently announced the formation of a parallel government in the region, would control all five Darfur state capitals if it were to successfully capture El-Fasher.
Experts have warned that the city’s non-Arab Zaghawa tribe may face a similar fate to the non-Arab Massalit tribe in West Darfur’s state capital of El-Geneina, where UN experts found up to 15,000 people, mostly from the tribe, were killed in 2023 massacres blamed on RSF forces.
Both warring sides have been accused of war crimes, but the RSF has, in particular, been accused of genocide, sexual violence and systematic looting.
In the early 2000s, the paramilitary force led a government-orchestrated campaign of ethnic cleansing against non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur, killing an estimated 300,000 people.
“The Janjaweed are about to win the entire genocide that began in the early 21st century,” Raymond said.
“And the world isn’t going to do anything about it.”
Seven dead, 71 wounded as Sudan’s RSF shells besieged city
https://arab.news/mhxhf
Seven dead, 71 wounded as Sudan’s RSF shells besieged city
- El-Fasher has become the most violent front line in the war between the Sudanese army and the RSF, which erupted in April 2023
Iraq’s dreams of wheat independence dashed by water crisis
- Iraq ranks fifth globally for climate risk
- Average temperatures in Iraq have risen nearly half a degree Celsius per decade since 2000
NAJAF: Iraqi wheat farmer Ma’an Al-Fatlawi has long depended on the nearby Euphrates River to feed his fields near the city of Najaf. But this year, those waters, which made the Fertile Crescent a cradle of ancient civilization 10,000 years ago, are drying up, and he sees few options.
“Drilling wells is not successful in our land, because the water is saline,” Al-Fatlawi said, as he stood by an irrigation canal near his parched fields awaiting the release of his allotted water supply.
A push by Iraq — historically among the Middle East’s biggest wheat importers — to guarantee food security by ensuring wheat production covers the country’s needs has led to three successive annual surpluses of the staple grain.
But those hard-won advances are now under threat as the driest year in modern history and record-low water levels in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have reduced planting and could slash the harvest by up to 50 percent this season.
“Iraq is facing one of the most severe droughts that has been observed in decades,” the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Iraq representative Salah El Hajj Hassan told Reuters.
VULNERABLE TO NATURE AND NEIGHBOURS
The crisis is laying bare Iraq’s vulnerability.
A largely desert nation, Iraq ranks fifth globally for climate risk, according to the UN’s Global Environment Outlook. Average temperatures in Iraq have risen nearly half a degree Celsius per decade since 2000 and could climb by up to 5.6 C by the end of the century compared to the period before industrialization, according to the International Energy Agency. Rainfall is projected to decline.
But Iraq is also at the mercy of its neighbors for 70 percent of its water supply. And Turkiye and Iran have been using upstream dams to take a greater share of the region’s shared resource.
The FAO says the diminishing amount of water that has trickled down to Iraq is the biggest factor behind the current crisis, which has forced Baghdad to introduce rationing.
Iraq’s water reserves have plunged from 60 billion cubic meters in 2020 to less than 4 billion today, said El Hajj Hassan, who expects wheat production this season to drop by 30 percent to 50 percent.
“Rain-fed and irrigated agriculture are directly affected nationwide,” he said.
EFFORTS TO END IMPORT DEPENDENCE UNDER THREAT
To wean the country off its dependence on imports, Iraq’s government has in recent years paid for high-yield seeds and inputs, promoted modern irrigation and desert farming to expand cultivation, and subsidised grain purchases to offer farmers more than double global wheat prices.
It is a plan that, though expensive, has boosted strategic wheat reserves to over 6 million metric tons in some seasons, overwhelming Iraq’s silo capacity. The government, which purchased around 5.1 million tons of the 2025 harvest, said in September that those reserves could meet up to a year of demand.
Others, however, including Harry Istepanian — a water expert and founder of Iraq Climate Change Center — now expect imports to rise again, putting the country at greater risk of higher food prices with knock-on effects for trade and government budgets.
“Iraq’s water and food security crisis is no longer just an environmental problem; it has immediate economic and security spillovers,” Istepanian told Reuters.
A preliminary FAO forecast anticipates wheat import needs for the 2025/26 marketing year to increase to about 2.4 million tons.
Global wheat markets are currently oversupplied, offering cheaper options, but Iraq could once again face price volatility.
Iraq’s trade ministry did not respond to a request for comment on the likelihood of increased imports.
In response to the crisis, the ministry of agriculture capped river-irrigated wheat at 1 million dunams in the 2025/26 season — half last season’s level — and mandated modern irrigation techniques including drip and sprinkler systems to replace flood irrigation through open canals, which loses water through evaporation and seepage.
A dunam is a measurement of area roughly equivalent to a quarter acre.
The ministry is allocating 3.5 million dunams in desert areas using groundwater. That too is contingent on the use of modern irrigation.
“The plan was implemented in two phases,” said Mahdi Dhamad Al-Qaisi, an adviser to the agriculture minister. “Both require modern irrigation.”
Rice cultivation, meanwhile, which is far more water-intensive than wheat, was banned nationwide.
RURAL LIVELIHOODS AT RISK
One ton of wheat production in Iraq requires about 1,100 cubic meters of water, said Ammar Abdul-Khaliq, head of the Wells and Groundwater Authority in southern Iraq. Pivoting to more dependence on wells to replace river water is risky.
“If water extraction continues without scientific study, groundwater reserves will decline,” he said.
Basra aquifers, he said, have already fallen by three to five meters.
Groundwater irrigation systems are also expensive due to the required infrastructure like sprinklers and concrete basins. That presents a further economic challenge to rural Iraqis, who make up around 30 percent of the population.
Some 170,000 people have already been displaced in rural areas due to water scarcity, the FAO’s El Hajj Hassan said.
“This is not a matter of only food security,” he said. “It’s worse when we look at it from the perspective of livelihoods.”
At his farm in Najaf, Al-Fatlawi is now experiencing that first-hand, having cut his wheat acreage to a fifth of its normal level this season and laid off all but two of his 10 workers.
“We rely on river water,” he said.
