Sudan paramilitaries shell hospital as violence rages nationwide

Shelling by Sudanese paramilitaries killed five people outside one of the last functioning hospitals in Khartoum’s twin city Omdurman Tuesday, with medical sources reporting escalating violence across the war-torn country.

A medical source in Al-Nao Hospital in Omdurman, requesting anonymity for safety reasons, said volunteers were among the dead.

“The shells landed in the garden adjacent to the hospital,” the source said, blaming the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), at war with the regular army since April 2023.

Al-Nao Hospital, which is supported by medical charity Doctors without Borders (MSF), lies in an area controlled by the army. It has been attacked repeatedly since the war began.

Greater Khartoum has been one of the main battlegrounds in the struggle for power between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy, RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.

The fighting, which has already killed tens of thousands and uprooted more than 12 million people, has escalated in recent weeks as the army mounted an offensive to wrest control of central Sudan and the capital itself.

The RSF has retreated from much of the central state of Al-Jazira but has launched repeated attacks on Khartoum, killing dozens of civilians.

While the army controls east and north Sudan, the paramilitaries maintain their hold on nearly all of the western region of Darfur — a vast area the size of France and home to a quarter of the country’s estimated 50 million people.

In South Darfur state capital Nyala, 1,200 kilometres (750 miles) from Khartoum, military air strikes killed 25 people on a second consecutive day of bombing, a medical source at Nyala Hospital told AFP.

Nyala, controlled by the RSF since late 2023, is a strategic city with a large airport which the RSF has used for resupplies and weapons deliveries, according to military and satellite imagery obtained by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab.

Some 200 kilometres north, RSF artillery rocked North Darfur state capital El-Fasher — the only major Darfur city not under paramilitary control — with “shells landing on the cattle market”, a witness told AFP.

– ‘Relentless’ –

After army victories in central Sudan, analysts believe the RSF is likely to concentrate on El-Fasher in an attempt to consolidate its hold on Darfur.

Despite issuing an ultimatum last month for the army and allied militias to leave El-Fasher ahead of an offensive, the RSF has been repeatedly pushed back by army-allied groups.

But civilians have paid the price, with the paramilitaries regularly shelling famine-stricken displacement camps around the city.

In the area around El-Fasher, famine has already taken hold in three displacement camps — Zamzam, Abu Shouk and Al-Salam — and is projected to expand to five more areas including the city itself by May, according to a UN-backed assessment.

Across North Darfur state, around two million people are facing extreme food insecurity, while 320,000 are already in famine conditions, according to UN estimates.

United Nations resident and humanitarian coordinator in Sudan Clementine Nkweta-Salami said that “the use of starvation as a weapon of war against innocent people in El-Fasher, North Darfur, is appalling.”

Attack on homes, markets and displacement camps were “a ruthless assault on human life”, said Nkweta-Salami, the top UN official in Sudan, calling the escalating violence “relentless”.

– South Kordofan –

In South Kordofan state capital Kadugli, 700 kilometres southwest of Khartoum, the UN’s humanitarian body said Tuesday more than 50 people were reportedly killed the day before by artillery fire the army-aligned government blamed on an unaffiliated rebel group.

Two medical sources told AFP Monday’s shelling came from “outside the city”, where a faction of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), led by Abdel Aziz al-Hilu, is posted.

SPLM-N on Tuesday accused the army of attacking its positions, shelling areas of South Kordofan it controls in an attempt to capture territory.

The army in turn has blamed SPLM-N for attacks this week in Blue Nile state, some 500 kilometres to the east.

Across Sudan, the war has created the world’s largest displacement crisis and what the International Rescue Committee has called “the biggest humanitarian crisis ever recorded”.

It has decimated Sudan’s fragile infrastructure, crumbled an already weak economy and pushed millions to the brink of mass starvation.