Army drone attack in Sudan’s Omdurman kills 15 – Lawyers’ group

A Sudanese military drone attack in the Khartoum area killed 15 civilians, pro-democracy lawyers said on Monday, 20 months into a war which has left the country in a crisis whose gravity the world does not understand, according to a UN official.

“The deadly attack resulted in the death of 15 people with six others injured and two individuals still missing,” said the Emergency Lawyers, who have been documenting human rights abuses throughout the war between the army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

Most of Omdurman — the capital’s twin city across the Nile River — is under army control but the drone attack — which occurred on Saturday — took place in western Omdurman which is under RSF control.

The truck, carrying milk barrels from surrounding villages to an area near a camel market in Omdurman, reportedly broke down on the road before being targeted by the military drone, the lawyers said.

They added that according to initial evidence the victims were all herders and workers involved in milk transportation.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed in the war which has displaced millions and left the northeast African country on the brink of famine, according to aid agencies.

Both the army and the RSF have been accused of targeting civilians and indiscriminately shelling residential areas.

The RSF holds Khartoum North (Bahri) just across the Nile River and also part of the greater Khartoum area.

Residents have continuously reported shelling across both sides of the river, with bombs and shrapnel regularly striking homes and civilians.

– ‘Make it stop’ –

Last Tuesday, Omdurman saw some of its heaviest fighting in months.

Eyewitnesses said artillery was striking Omdurman from multiple fronts.

Paramilitary shelling hit a passenger bus and other areas, killing at least 65 people and wounding hundreds on that day, according to the state’s army-aligned governor.

A single shell that hit a bus “killed everyone on board and turned 22 people into body parts,” Khartoum’s governor Ahmed Othman Hamza said in a statement, describing the attack as a “massacre” by the “terrorist militia”, a reference to RSF.

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An eyewitness at that time also reported shelling from the Wadi Seidna army base, in northern Omdurman, towards RSF positions in western Omdurman and across the river in Bahri.

Another centre of fighting has been in Sudan’s far-west, where local activists on Sunday reported an RSF drone attack killed at least 38 people in El-Fasher, the North Darfur state capital.

A high-level United Nations official on Monday, speaking from Geneva, said diplomatic efforts to address the conflict “are not commensurate with the needs”, given the scale of the humanitarian crisis.

“I don’t think the world realises the gravity of the Sudanese crisis,” said Mamadou Dian Balde, who is coordinating the United Nations refugee agency’s response to the Sudan crisis.

He called for the UN Security Council and states with influence on the parties to the conflict to “make it stop”.