The Japan Times - Clashes in Sudan's besieged Darfur city kill 57

The local resistance committee, a grassroots aid group, said the civilians were killed on Wednesday in clashes and shelling of the city by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, at war with the army since April 2023.

The violence came just days after the RSF killed more than 400 people in attacks on North Darfur's capital of El-Fasher and nearby displacement camps, according to the United Nations.

El-Fasher, which the RSF has besieged for nearly a year, is the last major urban stronghold in Darfur still under army control.

It is a strategic target for the paramilitary group, which has sought to consolidate its hold on Darfur following the army's recapture of the capital Khartoum last month.

In an earlier statement, the army put Wednesday's death toll at 62, including 15 children ages three to 10, and dozens more wounded.

It said it had repelled the "fierce" assault on the city's east in a coordinated response with "allied armed movements, intelligence services, the police" and volunteer fighters.

El-Fasher has been defended in large part by a coalition of army-allied groups known as the Joint Forces.

- Hundreds of thousands flee -

The war, which entered its third year on Tuesday, has killed tens of thousands, uprooted 13 million and created what the UN describes as the world's largest hunger and displacement crises.

It has also fractured the country essentially in two, with the army holding the centre, north and east while the RSF controls nearly all of Darfur and, along with its allies, parts of the south.

After Friday's major offensive in Darfur, the RSF announced that it had taken full control of Zamzam refugee camp -- which is one of Sudan's largest.

Zamzam -- home to about one million displaced people according to aid sources -- was the first area of Sudan where famine was declared in August last year.

By December, famine spread to two nearby displacement camps in Darfur as well as parts of the south, according to a UN-backed assessment.

About 400,000 people were displaced from Zamzam after the RSF seized the camp, the UN's migration agency said on Monday.

In the past two weeks, an estimated 450,000 people have arrived in Tawila alone, a town about 60 kilometres (37 miles) west of Zamzam, according to the local Emergency Response Room -- one of hundreds across Sudan coordinating frontline aid.

The newly displaced, they added, are suffering from acute shortages of food, clean drinking water and shelter materials, with barely any humanitarian aid available in the area.

K.Inoue--JT