UN officials condemn ‘horrifying’ mass killings in Sudan
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Sudan's leaders hoped to reopen Khartoum airport after more than a year and a half to show they control the capital, but the morning brought explosions instead.
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Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, in what the United Nations chief called a “terrible escalation” in the conflict.
The RSF denies widespread allegations that the killings in el-Fasher are ethnically motivated and follow a pattern of the Arab paramilitaries targeting non-Arab populations. Activists have also stepped up demands for international pressure on the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which is accused of providing military support to the RSF.
The city’s fall gives RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo—known as Hemedti—control of Sudan’s entire western frontier and all five Darfur states. Those borders with Libya, Chad and South Sudan form arteries of a shadow economy moving gold, weapons and fuel from the Sahel to the Red Sea—the same routes Iran once used to arm Hamas and Hezbollah.
Sudanese rebels have driven government forces from El Fasher, the last stronghold of the country’s regime in the western Darfur region, amid a brutal struggle for territory that has led to alleged genocide and contributed to one of the world’s most severe humanitarian crises.
A domestic passenger flight has landed at Khartoum International Airport for the first time since the war broke out over two years ago.
Emerging evidence of systematic killings in the Sudanese city of el-Fasher have prompted human rights and aid activists to describe the civil war between the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the military as a "continuation of the Darfur genocide".
The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have targeted Sudan’s capital Khartoum and its main airport with drones, a day after the first passenger flight in two years landed in the city amid the civil war.