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An airstrike by Sudan\u2019s military ripped through a crowded market in the country\u2019s western region of Darfur, killing at least 54 people and wounding dozens more, according to local monitoring groups which called the attack a likely war crime.<\/p>\n
The attack on Monday came as Sudan\u2019s military continued to make sweeping gains in the capital, Khartoum, where it seized the presidential palace on Friday. The military is now trying to drive its foe, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, entirely out the city.<\/p>\n
The reported atrocity in Darfur, though, was a grim reminder of the brutal toll of Sudan\u2019s war, the largest in Africa, as it approaches two full years. Videos and photographs from the aftermath of the strike in Toura, a small town in North Darfur, showed dozens of charred bodies and partial human remains strewed across a smoldering expanse in a town market.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The videos were geolocated to Toura by the Sudan Witness Project<\/a> at the Centre for Information Resilience, a nonprofit that documents potential war crimes. Satellite images and data from NASA satellites that detect fires confirmed that an area of around 10,000 square meters was burned on Monday.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The exact toll was unclear. One Sudanese monitoring group said dozens had been killed. The American international advocacy group Avaaz, citing local groups, put it at over 200 dead. A handwritten list of fatalities provided by activists in Darfur had 54 names.<\/p>\n Witnesses said the attack came from the air; the Rapid Support Forces do not have air power, but the Sudanese military does, and has carried out other airstrikes in the region recently.<\/p>\n The military said in a statement that any allegations that the attack was an atrocity committed against civilians \u201care completely false and are repeatedly raised whenever our forces exercise their constitutional and legitimate right to engage hostile targets.\u201d<\/p>\n The military\u2019s statement said, \u201cWe strictly adhere to targeting protocols in accordance with international law,\u201d and went on to accuse the Rapid Support Forces of \u201csystematically attacking civilians since the outbreak of the war.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Sudan\u2019s sprawling civil war has forced nearly 13 million people from their homes since it started in April 2023, and has caused many tens of thousands of deaths, according to estimates from the United Nations and Western nations. Parts of the country are in famine. Both sides have been accused of atrocities.<\/p>\n The Rapid Support Forces has faced the most frequent accusations of brutality, including charges by the United States of genocide over ethnic massacres<\/a> carried out by the Forces\u2019 troops in Darfur.<\/p>\n The army, however, has been accused frequently of indiscriminate bombing in areas held by the Rapid Support Forces, often killing dozens of people at once. Most of those attacks have also taken place in Darfur.<\/p>\n \u201cAll of these are poor, innocent unarmed people,\u201d said the narrator of one graphic video<\/a> as he walked through the carnage of the strike in Toura on Monday. \u201cThey have no affiliation\u201d with either side, he added.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n