Sixty-five people, most of them children, have been killed since Saturday in El Fasher, in the vast Darfur region of Sudanin shelling by the paramilitary forces of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), local mutual aid committees announced yesterday.

The DTY has been engaged in a war with the Sudanese armed forces for over fifteen months. Hostilities, extremely intense, have been raging since early May in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, the only urban center in western Sudan that has not yet fallen to the paramilitaries.

The coordination of the resistance committees of El Faser reported yesterday that “the DTY killed in just three days more than 43 children, 13 women and 9 men”, residents of the city.

“In one day alone, more than 70 rockets were fired by the Janjaweed paramilitaries against hospitals, homes, Islamic mosques and markets,” the statement continued, using the name of Arab militias that have carried out mass killings in Darfur since 2003 — a successor form of which are DTY.

“One of the bloodiest days for El Fasher, for the civilian population, for the mosques and hospitals, above all for the Saudi hospital,” Mini Minawi, the governor of the Darfur region, spoke through X. He alleged that the DTY was transporting a “rocket launch system through Jenaina”, the capital of West Darfur, to El Faser. “The silence of the international community is a shame,” he added.

At least 22 people died on Saturday in the bombings of al-Fasser, said a medical source at the Saudi hospital that was also targeted.

The DTY have laid siege to the city, trapping hundreds of thousands of civilians in their attempt to take it over.

The war in Sudan broke out on 15 April 2023 between the army, under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitaries, under the then number two of the military junta, General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo. It has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people, with some estimates as high as 150,000, according to the US special envoy for Sudan, Tom Periello.

It has also forced more than 11 million people to become internally displaced persons and refugees, has caused widespread damage to infrastructure and brought Sudan to the brink of famine.

Both warring sides are accused of a series of war crimes, including deliberately targeting civilians and obstructing, or looting, humanitarian aid intended for the civilian population.