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full screen Refugees in conflict-affected Darfur in Sudan. Photo: Patricia Simon/AP/TT
Fierce fighting for two weeks in the city of al-Fashir in Sudan has claimed over 100 lives.
The intense clashes between Sudan’s army and paramilitary forces concern the important provincial capital of North Darfur.
“The signs indicate violent intensity in the fighting,” the organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said on Sunday. According to the organization, over 120 people have been killed in connection with the fighting and more than 900 people have been injured.
“We call on both parties to do more to protect civilians,” continues MSF.
The civil war in Sudan broke out in April last year, when the former partners in the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began fighting each other. The capital Khartoum has been hit hard by the fighting, but the provinces of the Darfur region have simultaneously become the decisive theater of war.
The town of al-Fashir is one of the last strongholds in the area held by the army. The RSF and the affiliated Janjawid militias aim to control all of Darfur.
The Janjawid militias are accused of carrying out genocide in Darfur in western Sudan in the early 2000s when they were hired by then-dictator Omar al-Bashir to attack the population of the province.
The RSF was partially formed from the Janjawid militias in 2013.
Officially, around 14,000 people have been killed in the latest conflict, but the real death toll is believed to be much higher.