At least 31 people have been killed and 100 wounded since the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces renewed an assault on the city of Sennar in southeastern Sudan on Sunday, a legal activist group said.
Families flee RSF advances in Sudan's El Gezira state, on Sennar Road in the city of al-Dinder, Sennar state, Sudan, July 18, 2024. Reuters/ Faiz Abubakr
At least 31 people have been killed and 100 wounded since the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces renewed an assault on the city of Sennar in southeastern Sudan on Sunday, a legal activist group said.
Several parts of the city including the main market have been targeted by RSF artillery fire, said Emergency Lawyers, which has monitored civilian deaths and other humanitarian violations.
The progress of the RSF, which already controls most of Sennar and at least half of the country, has slowed in the southeast as heavy rains have made movement difficult.
Its war with Sudan's army has created the world's largest hunger and internal displacement crises, killing tens of thousands of civilians and destroying most of Sudan's infrastructure and economy.
Emergency Lawyers said the army had killed at least four people in al-Souki, a town near Sennar, during airstrikes. The RSF killed one person and wounded 17 in artillery strikes on el-Obeid, another town it has struggled to assert full control of.
Both sides in Sudan's 18-month-old civil war have committed abuses that may amount to war crimes, a U.N.-mandated mission said on Friday, calling for peacekeepers and a country-wide arms embargo.
On Saturday, Sudan's army-aligned foreign ministry rejected both recommendations, calling the idea of international peacekeepers "the wish of Sudan's enemies and it will not be fulfilled."
Reporting by Khalid Abdelaziz and Nafisa Eltahir
A Moroccan prosecutor said on Wednesday he had ordered the release of veteran journalist and political commentator Ali Lmrabet after questioning him, although an investigation continues following allegations of defamation and libel.
G7 foreign ministers and the European Union's foreign policy chief on Wednesday urged Sudan's Rapid Support Forces and allied armed groups to stop all actions that could lead to further atrocities or endanger civilians in El-Obeid.
The Sudanese army has conditioned any broad acceptance of a U.S. proposal for ending the country's three-year-old civil war on the full withdrawal by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces from cities it has occupied, according to documents seen by Reuters.
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