“A fire broke out in Atbara after a drone attack during iftar,” the dinner that follows the breaking of the Ramadan fast, an eyewitness said by phone.
An attack by a remote-controlled unmanned aerial system killed at least a dozen people and injured 30 others on Tuesday in Atbara, a city that has so far remained relatively unscathed by Sudan’s nearly year-long bloody war, a medical source and eyewitnesses said in French. Agency.
“A fire broke out in Atbara after a drone attack during iftar,” the dinner that follows the breaking of the Ramadan fast, an eyewitness said by phone.
At the meal, which was “organized by the Islamist militia Baraa at its base” —s.s. it’s an armed group fighting alongside the army—”civilians and paramilitaries had gathered,” another resident said.
“Panic was caused when the explosion occurred” among residents in Atbara, an army stronghold some 300 km northeast of the capital Khartoum, he said.
The bodies of “twelve victims” and “thirty wounded” were rushed to the city’s hospital, an AFP medical source said, without specifying whether they were civilians or paramilitaries. A previous preliminary report spoke of seven dead and ten injured.
So far, there has been no claim of responsibility for the attack.
The war, which broke out on April 15 between the head of the armed forces, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and his then-deputy chief, General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, head of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Sudanese and turned 8.5 million more internally displaced and refugees, the UN estimates.
But until yesterday the fighting had not reached Atbara, where army units are stationed to protect the strategically important city on the road to Port Sudan, on the Red Sea, where the loyalist government has relocated in military.
The paramilitaries, who control most of the capital and large parts of the country, are equipped with drones, but their positions are some 250km from Atbara on the road from Khartoum.
The DTY, a reincarnation of the Arab Janjaweed paramilitary groups that a decade ago implemented a scorched-earth policy in Darfur on the orders of former dictator Omar al-Bashir, now also control most of Darfur, a vast region cut off from the rest of the country for months.
The day before yesterday, Monday, “army planes bombarded the town of El Fasher, killing civilians” in the capital of North Darfur state, 800 km from Khartoum, where “thousands of civilians who fled to escape the fighting have taken refuge in Darfur,” Tom Periello, the new US special envoy for Sudan, said yesterday via X.
Across the country, paramilitaries, like the armed forces, “continue to block the entry of humanitarian aid and restrict the freedom of movement of civilians. This blatant disregard for civilian lives is exacerbating the humanitarian and refugee crisis in Sudan,” he added.
Source: RES-EMP
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