Sudan Conflict: Dozens Dead After Air Strike; Army Lambasts African Union

The Sudanese army conducted an air strike that killed dozens, including civilians, while many others were injured in a market in southern Khartoum.

The news of the attack was announced by a local volunteer group on Sunday and the incident marks the largest single-incident death toll since the beginning of the war in Sudan in April. As the war between the Sudanese army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) nears the five-month mark, air and artillery strikes in residential areas have intensified.

Sudan's Months-Long War

Neither of the two parties involved has declared victory or has shown any concrete signs that they plan to pursue mediation. On Sunday, drones were used to carry out a series of heavy air strikes on southern Khartoum.

The area is a large district of the city that is occupied mainly by the paramilitary RSF, said an eyewitness who saw the strike. They asked not to be identified for security concerns. Images shown by a body of local volunteers known as the Southern Khartoum Emergency Room featured many women and men injured and what seemed to be dead bodies covered in cloth, as per Reuters.

Residents in the battered area tend to be day workers who, after being cut off from their jobs, have become too poor to afford the cost of escaping from the capital. A spokesman for the Emergency Room, Mohamed Abdallah, said that the injured people had to be transported on rickshaws or donkey carts.

The RSF released a statement where it accused the Sudanese army of carrying out the attack and several other strikes in the area. However, the army denied responsibility and instead blamed the RSF for the assault.

Brigadier General Nabil Abdallah said that the army only aimed its attacks at the enemy's groupings and stations in different areas. While the paramilitary has fanned out across residential areas throughout the capital Khartoum and neighboring Bahri and Omdurman, the Sudanese army utilized its heavy artillery and air strikes to push the RSF back, which has resulted in hundreds of civilian casualties.

Read Also: Biden Forges Strategic Partnership With Vietnam as China Continues To Expand Influence

Dozens of Casualties

Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), a humanitarian medical care charity, described the situation in Khartoum as "carnage." It noted that there were more than 60 people who were wounded because of the attack, according to BBC.

The MSF's emergency coordinator, Marie Burton, on Sunday, said that Khartoum "has been at war for almost six months." On the same day, Burton posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, that volunteers and medical personnel in Bashair Hospital were shocked and overwhelmed by the scale of the horror in the city.

On Saturday, Sudanese army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan said that they do not need the African Union to resolve the country's ongoing conflict. Tensions rose after the head of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, met with a political adviser to the RSF last week.

Diplomatic efforts that sought to end the conflict between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary have repeatedly floundered. The United States and Saudi Arabia brokered multiple truces in the early stages of the war, which were systematically violated before the two mediators adjourned talks in June, said the Manila Times.