By Barbara Plett Usher & Natasha Booty | BBC News, in Port Sudan & London |
A Sudanese war monitor has accused the military of killing hundreds of people in an air strike on a market in the country’s western Darfur region.
The Emergency Lawyers group – which documents abuses by both sides in Sudan’s civil war that erupted in April 2023 – said the bombing of Tur’rah market was a “horrific massacre” that had also left hundreds injured.
Videos posted on social media – some by the army’s rival the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group that controls much of Darfur – showed the smoking ruins of market stalls and bodies charred beyond recognition.
A military spokesperson denied targeting civilians, saying it only attacked legitimate hostile targets.
Both the Sudanese armed forces and RSF have repeatedly been accused of shelling civilian areas.
The RSF has deployed drones in Darfur, but the army has the warplanes – and regularly strikes RSF positions across the region.
The BBC has not been able to confirm the death toll or the exact date of the attack on the market, which is located about 35km (21 miles) north of the army-held city of el-Fasher.
A Darfur activist group – the Darfur Initiative for Justice and Peace – said it happened on Monday and called it the “deadliest single bombing since the beginning of the war”.
Civilian deaths in bombing and shelling attacks have intensified in recent months with the escalation of fighting in the country’s brutal civil conflict.
Some 12 million Sudanese people have fled their homes since war broke out – that is equivalent to Belgium or Tunisia’s entire population.
Famine has taken hold and starvation is widespread, the UN says, with over half the country experiencing “high levels of acute food insecurity”.
Estimates vary, but it is said that at least 150,000 people have been killed by the fighting.
The RSF has denied evidence that it is committing a genocide in Darfur, including the murder of thousands of civilians, external, and the rape of non-Arab women as a means of “ethnic cleansing”.
According the UN, Sudan is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
