NYALA (The Thursday Times) — Sudanese army drone strikes on a busy market in Nyala, the de facto capital of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in Darfur, killed more than 100 people, most of them women and children, a Sudanese rights group said, though other tallies are far lower.
Emergency Lawyers, which tracks violence in the war, put the toll from Monday evening’s attack at more than 100 dead and 113 wounded. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said a hospital it supports in Nyala received 36 bodies in the hours after the strike, 21 of them in civilian clothes, and that its teams saw more than 150 wounded. The Sudan Doctors Network preliminarily reported 21 dead and more than 40 wounded. None of the figures could be independently verified.
Fighters and food sellers
Witnesses told the Associated Press that hundreds of RSF fighters had gathered at the market that evening. A cigarette seller said a drone struck at around 8pm, killing dozens of fighters as well as women selling food. Another witness estimated that about 14 civilians, including women and children, were among the dead, most of them women selling tea and food. MSF said a second strike then hit a civilian neighbourhood.
“Markets, homes, and key civilian infrastructure are not targets,” MSF said. “All parties to the conflict must protect civilians.”
A spokesman for the Special Operations Forces fighting alongside the army said separately that more than 150 “militia recruits” had been killed in a “precise and targeted air strike” on the Dumaya camp west of Nyala.
A drone war
Drone strikes have become the leading cause of civilian deaths in Sudan’s war between the army and the RSF, now in its fourth year, the United Nations says, and killed more than 300 people in the first three weeks of October alone. The conflict has created the world’s worst displacement crisis and pushed parts of the country into famine. In Nyala, the share of children treated for severe acute malnutrition more than doubled between January and August, according to UN estimates.
