More than 100 people were killed in a Sudanese military drone strike on a busy market in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur province in southwestern Sudan, the rights group Emergency Lawyers said in a statement on Tuesday, the Associated Press reported. The group said the strike happened on Monday evening and also injured 113 people, and that many of those killed and injured were women and children.
Source: Associated Press via AccessNorthGA
Awaaz Punjab's earlier report on the same Monday-evening strike, based on a medic at Nyala Hospital and witnesses speaking to AFP, put the toll at at least 21 killed and more than 40 injured. The new figures are a major escalation of the reported toll from the same event, not a separate strike, and the final toll has not been independently confirmed.
Emergency Lawyers, a Sudanese rights group tracking violence in the country, blamed the Sudanese military for the strike on the market and condemned the attack. 'This massacre transformed a civilian marketplace into a scene of mass killing and injury and is an assault that threatens the lives of residents and compounds their suffering amid the ongoing war,' the group said, calling for an independent investigation into the strike.
Doctors Without Borders, known as MSF, separately reported that 36 bodies arrived at its hospital in Nyala and that its emergency room treated more than 150 wounded patients — hospital figures that confirm a large casualty toll but do not by themselves confirm the rights group's higher estimate. Reporting on MSF's account said a second drone strike also struck a residential neighbourhood, and that patients arrived with shrapnel wounds, severe burns and other traumatic injuries, some carried on motorcycles and animal-drawn carts.
Source: Universal Adage (MSF account)
What is solid
- A drone strike hit a busy market in Nyala on Monday evening; Nyala is the South Darfur capital and a major stronghold of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.
- MSF received 36 bodies at its Nyala hospital and treated more than 150 wounded, according to MSF's own account.
- Sudan's war between the military and the Rapid Support Forces has been running since April 2023, and the AP reported it has killed at least 59,000 people.
What is only claimed
- The total death toll: Emergency Lawyers says more than 100 killed and 113 injured; the first report from the scene said at least 21 killed. Neither figure has been independently verified as final, and Awaaz Punjab reports both with attribution.
- Responsibility: Emergency Lawyers and MSF attributed the strike to Sudan's military; that attribution is reported here as their claim, not as independently established fact.
The same AP report noted that a separate drone strike on a power substation left parts of Sudan's capital, Khartoum, without electricity on Tuesday, as drone warfare has escalated across the country in recent weeks, killing hundreds, according to the AP.
Emergency Lawyers has called for an independent investigation into the Nyala strike. Until hospitals, authorities and independent monitors publish reconciled figures, the toll should be read as a range — at least the 36 bodies received by MSF, with a rights group reporting more than 100 killed in total — rather than a single settled number.