Sudan's paramilitary forces kill 13 people in Darfur, mostly women and children, group says

CAIRO (AP) — Sudan's notorious paramilitary forces attacked a group of people on a road in the country's troubled Darfur region on Sunday, killing at least 13, mostly women and children, a medical group said.

The killings were the latest by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and came a day after the RSF shelled a hospital in the besieged city of el-Fasher in North Darfur. The road where the attack took place links el-Fasher to the nearby town of Tweila.

The Sudan Doctors Network, a group of medical professionals tracking the Sudanese civil war, said five children, four women and four older people were killed, claiming it was an ethnically motivated attack.

The killing was “another episode in the ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide being perpetrated by the RSF against unarmed civilians in Darfur,” the doctors' group said.

On Saturday, the RSF shelled a hospital in el-Fasher, wounding a healthcare worker and six patients, the doctors' group said. Among the wounded patients were a child and a pregnant woman.

The RSF didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the killing and the hospital shelling.

The attacks were part of RSF’s ongoing campaign to seize control of el-Fasher, the Sudanese military’s last stronghold in Darfur. The U.N. human rights office said it documented the RSF killing of at least 89 civilians, including 16 who were “summarily executed” in el-Fasher and the nearby Abu Shouk displacement camp, in a span of 10 days this month.

The paramilitaries have bombed the city for more than a year, and last month it imposed a total blockade around its hundreds of thousands of people.

Sudan plunged into chaos when simmering tensions between the military and the RSF exploded into open fighting in April 2023 in Khartoum and elsewhere.

The fighting has turned into a full-fledged civil war that killed tens of thousands of people, displaced over 14 people out of their homes and pushed parts of the country into famine.

The devastating conflict has been marked by atrocities including mass killings and rape, which the International Criminal Court is investigating as war crimes and crimes against humanity.