Air strike in Sudan's Omdurman kills more than 20 people

Smoke rises over Khartoum, Sudan, Friday, June 23, 2023. (AP Photo)

An airstrike in a Sudanese city has killed at least 22 people, health authorities said, one of the deadliest in the weeks-long fighting between Sudan’s rival generals.

The attack took place in a residential area in Omdurman, the neighbouring city of the capital, Khartoum, according to a brief statement by the health ministry on Saturday. The attack wounded an unspecified number of people, it said.

While the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) quickly dominated the capital Khartoum and its sister cities Omdurman and Bahri after fighting broke out on April 15, the army has launched air and artillery strikes.

Fighting has focused on Omdurman in recent days, as the western part of the city is a key supply route for the RSF to bring reinforcements in from Darfur, its power base.

Strikes, including overnight on Friday, have also centred on the country's state broadcasting complex in eastern Omdurm an. Other overnight strikes hit southern and eastern Khartoum.

The army said in a post on Facebook that special forces had killed 20 "rebel soldiers" and destroyed their weaponry.

Growing civil war

The fighting, for which no mediation efforts have succeeded thus far, threatens to drag the country into a wider civil war, drawing in other internal and external actors in the East African nation that lies between the Horn of Africa, Sahel, and the Red Sea.

Tensions between both sides had grown in the months leading up to the war over the chain of command and integration of their forces under a new transition to democracy.

At least 1,133 people have been killed in the fighting, according to the federal health ministry, which has flared in the capital and the Kordofan and Darfur regions, sparking ethnic violence in West Darfur state.

More than 2.9 million people have been uprooted, including nearly 700,000 who have fled to neighbouring countries.

It has also caused "alarming numbers" of rape and abduction of women and girls, according to aid agencies.

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Source: TRT