At least 11 children killed in el-Fasher drone strike, UN says

Audio By Carbonatix

CAIRO (AP) — At least 11 children were killed in a drone strike four days ago that hit a mosque in the besieged city of el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, the U.N. children’s agency said Monday.

Local aid groups and activists and the Sudanese army accused the paramilitary group the Rapid Support Forces of launching the attack during prayers early Friday, killing at least 70 people and leaving many others trapped under the rubble.

Initial reports indicated that at least 11 children between the ages of 6 and 15 were killed and “many more” wounded in the attack, which also damaged nearby homes, said UNICEF’s Executive Director Catherine Russell in Monday’s statement, calling the attack “shocking."

“The people who were killed were absolutely innocent. They were people seeking shelter, people praying in a mosque. It’s an atrocious, unconscionable act,” Sheldon Yett, UNICEF Representative to Sudan, told The Associated Press.

The strike came as the army and the RSF fight increasingly intense battles as part of the country’s ongoing civil war. The war has killed at least 40,000 people, according to the World Health Organization, displaced as many as 12 million others, and pushed many to the brink of famine.

Three doctors died in the attack, according to the Preliminary Committee of Sudan’s Doctors Trade Union and Sudan Doctors Network. They were among 231 medical personnel killed since the war in Sudan broke out, according to Sudan Doctors Network.

“The latest attack has torn apart families and shattered any sense of safety for children who have already suffered so much,” said Russell, adding that the RSF's siege of el-Fasher has trapped children who endure violence and have little access to food, clean water and healthcare while being “forced to witness horrors no child should ever see.”

Antoine Gerard, Sudan Deputy Humanitarian Coordinator with the U.N., told the AP on Monday that they are seeing more attacks on civilians now inside el-Fasher, who are also struggling to seek safety outside the city due to the siege and lack of safe routes.

“We are quite concerned about targeting civilians, targeting the population and particularly hospital(s), mosque(s) and schools and any other civilian premises,” he said.

In a statement on Sunday, Sudan’s neighboring nation, Egypt, condemned the drone strike and said it “constitutes a blatant violation of international humanitarian law, denouncing the targeting of places of worship and innocent civilians in the conflict.”

Fighting over the control of el-Fasher and surrounding areas in North Darfur intensified by early April and more than 400 civilians have been killed in RSF attacks in the area since April 10, according to a Friday report by the U.N.'s human rights office. The majority were killed in a major offensive that seized the nearby Zamzam displacement camp. The camp was turned into an RSF military base used to launch assaults on el-Fasher, according to the report.

Thousands of children in Darfur are at risk of malnutrition, while others are already acutely malnourished, according to Yett, who said that people in el-Fasher have limited access to food.

“We know that all of North Darfur is severely affected. We know the disease rates are skyrocketing. We know water and sanitation (are) hard to come by." Yett said, adding that all this combined "means the death of many children who shouldn’t have to die,”