No fewer than seventeen people, including five children, were on Saturday killed in an air strike in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, officials revealed.
Africa Today News, New York can confirm that twenty-five homes were destroyed in Saturday’s strike in the densely populated Yarmouk district.
After a prominent army commander promised to intensify attacks against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, it happened the next day.
Intense power struggles among the country’s military leadership led to fighting between the Sudanese army and the RSF in the middle of April.
Early in June, the RSF asserted complete control of Yarmouk, a section of the capital that is home to an arsenal.
Precise figures on the number of people killed in the fighting are difficult to establish, but it is believed to be well over 1,000, including many civilians caught in the crossfire.
Read Also: One Million Children Displaced From Homes In Sudan – UN
Roughly 2.2 million people have been displaced within the country and more than half a million are sheltering in neighbouring countries, according to the UN.
Several ceasefires have been announced to allow people to escape the fighting but these have not been observed.
The recent attack targeted civilians in Mayo, Yarmouk, and Mandela areas, according to the RSF. The army has not commented.
Hours later, the warring factions agreed a 72-hour ceasefire starting at 06:00 (04:00 GMT) on Sunday. Similar ceasefires in the past have not been observed.
Africa Today News, New York reports that since the hostilities began, tens of thousands of civilians have fled across the border into neighbouring Chad.
Doctors and hospitals there have been overstretched and struggling to cope. The violence has also resurrected a two-decade-old conflict in Sudan’s western Darfur region.
The ongoing crisis in Sudan has have no fewer than one million children displaced with 270,000 of them in the Darfur region, the UN children’s agency (UNICEF) revealed on Saturday, warning that more were at ‘grave risk’.
Africa Today News, New York recalls that fighting had ensured in Sudan from mid-April between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who commands the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).