Militia drone and artillery strikes have killed at least 60 people at a displacement shelter in the besieged city of El Fasher in western Sudan, a local activist group has said.
The Resistance Committee for El Fasher said the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group hit the Dar al-Arqam displacement centre, which is in the grounds of a university.
Bodies remained trapped in the rubble, the committee said in a statement, describing it as a “massacre” and calling on the international community to intervene. It said in a later statement that the shelter had been hit twice by drones and eight times by artillery shells on Friday and Saturday.
“Children, women and the elderly were killed in cold blood, and many were completely burned,” said the committee, which is part of a group of activists who coordinate aid and document abuses in the Sudan conflict. “The situation has gone beyond disaster and genocide inside the city, and the world remains silent.”
The RSF has been fighting the Sudanese Armed Forces in a civil war since April 2023. Its militants have put El Fasher under siege for more than 500 days, and families there are starving.
El Fasher – home to 400,000 people – is the last state capital in the region of Darfur that has not been taken by the RSF. It has become a strategic front in the war as the paramilitaries attempt to consolidate control in the west.
The UN has described the Sudan war as one of the worst humanitarian crises of the 21st century. More than 150,000 people have been killed and more than 14 million displaced. Nearly 25 million people have been forced into acute hunger.
Countrywide fighting, fuelled by international powers, has raged in the absence of an effective global effort to end the bloodshed.
On Friday, the UN high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, said he was “appalled by the RSF’s endless and wanton disregard for civilian life” in El Fasher.
He said: “Despite repeated calls, including my own, for specific care to be taken to protect civilians, they continue instead to kill, injure and displace civilians, and to attack civilian objects, including [internally displaced people’s] shelters, hospitals and mosques, with total disregard for international law. This must end.”
Sudan’s current conflict erupted in 2023, but is part of decades of violence. On Monday, the international criminal court (ICC) took its first action against a suspect of crimes in Darfur when it convicted a leader of a militia for atrocities committed there more than 20 years ago.
Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-al-Rahman, also known by the nom de guerre Ali Kushayb, was accused of being a leader of the Janjaweed militia, a group from which the RSF developed.
The former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir is also wanted by the ICC on genocide charges.
Türk said the RSF, and all parties to the conflict, should “draw lessons from this week’s conviction of Ali Kushayb”.
Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
