In an attack on the only functioning hospital in the city of Al-Fashir in southwestern Sudan, at least 70 people were killed on Saturday, reports the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on X. “At the time of the attack, the hospital was full of patients who received care.”
The attack is attributed to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which since April 2023 have been involved in a bloody power struggle with the government army. Al-Fashir, which has around a million inhabitants, is in the hands of the government army and has been besieged by the RSF since May. A UN official responsible for humanitarian aid in the country warned Thursday that the RSF had given the government army and its allies “an ultimatum of 48 hours” to leave the city.
One of the greatest humanitarian crises
The war in Sudan arose after a conflict between the current government leader Abdel Fattah al-Curhan and RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti. After the fall of President Omar Al-Bashir in 2019, the two worked together to suppress the civil revolution. In 2021 they committed a military coup together, but after mutual fight, the war that has been around for almost two years broke out.
Since the intake of the strategic city of Wad Madani by the government army on the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, the fighting between the two parties has been further performed and a sustainable peace still seems far away.
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According to human rights organizations, one of the greatest humanitarian crises in the world is now in Sudan. The government army also regularly performs bombing with many deaths and the US accuses the army of it to use chemical weapons. Both sides are hungry by the United Nations of accused as a war weapon. The RSF previously carried out ethnic cleansing in the Darfur region. According to the Red Cross, at least half of the 50 million Sudanese are in “acute food insecurity” and five million people are “on the edge of famine.”
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