An airstrike by Sudan’s military ripped through a crowded market in the country’s 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.
The attack on Monday came as Sudan’s 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.
The reported atrocity in Darfur, though, was a grim reminder of the brutal toll of Sudan’s 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.
The videos were geolocated to Toura by the Sudan Witness Project 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.
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.
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.
The military said in a statement that any allegations that the attack was an atrocity committed against civilians “are completely false and are repeatedly raised whenever our forces exercise their constitutional and legitimate right to engage hostile targets.”
The military’s statement said, “We strictly adhere to targeting protocols in accordance with international law,” and went on to accuse the Rapid Support Forces of “systematically attacking civilians since the outbreak of the war.”
Sudan’s 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.
The Rapid Support Forces has faced the most frequent accusations of brutality, including charges by the United States of genocide over ethnic massacres carried out by the Forces’ troops in Darfur.
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.
“All of these are poor, innocent unarmed people,” said the narrator of one graphic video as he walked through the carnage of the strike in Toura on Monday. “They have no affiliation” with either side, he added.
Analysis of the footage by The Times, which shows several pockets of scorched ground across the market, suggests that there were multiple explosions. In a video filmed at the scene, a witness said that four missiles had hit the market, one striking its center and three striking the outskirts.
Emergency Lawyers, a Sudanese group that documents atrocities on both sides of the war, called it a “horrific massacre” and a likely war crime.
In Khartoum, army officers said on Tuesday that the paramilitaries had withdrawn from Burri, a key neighborhood located between the River Nile and the main international airport.
On a walking tour of the city center with Sudanese forces, The Times passed through streets littered with debris and charred vehicles, and lined with destroyed office blocks. Half a dozen decomposing bodies lay at one traffic junction.
Explosions and gunfire echoed as military forces sought to flush out the last remaining pockets of R.S.F. fighters in the area.
It would likely take two weeks to drive the paramilitaries from the city, said the area commander, Brig. Gen. Yasir Hassan. He led journalists to captured armored vehicles that he said had been supplied to the R.S.F. by the United Arab Emirates, the group’s main foreign sponsor.
General Hassan described the Emirates, which denies backing the R.S.F., as “the statelet of evil” — unusually harsh language between once-friendly Arab nations that pointed to the deep divisions brought about by Sudan’s war.
The bombing in Darfur was an ominous portent for the war’s future direction.
If the R.S.F. is pushed out of Khartoum, it will likely retreat to Darfur, where it has promised to establish a parallel government. That raises the prospect of Sudan being split between rival administrations, much as Libya has been since the Arab Spring in 2011.
Analysts say the R.S.F. is also likely to intensify it efforts to capture El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, which its forces have been besieging for almost a year, and where a famine is also raging.
Reporting was contributed by Declan Walsh and Abdalrahman Altayeb from Khartoum, Sudan, and by Abubakr Abdelbagi and Christoph Koettl from New York.