Artillery shooting and air strikes killed at least 56 people across Greater Khartoum on Saturday, according to a medical source and activists, the latest blood emit in Sudan’s devastating war.

Sudan’s regular army and the paramilitary rapid support forces (RSF) have been locked in a battle for power since April 2023, intensified this month with the army struggling to take back control of the capital.

RSF shooting killed 54 and wounded 158 people in a busy market on Army Readed Redurman, part of Greater Khartoum, overwhelming the city’s al-Nao hospital, according to a medical source and the Ministry of Health.

“The shells hit the middle of the vegetable market, that’s why the victims and the wounded are so many,” a survivor told AFP.

RSF refused to carry out the attack, as French medical charity doctors without borders (MSF) said caused “complete carnage” in the hospital.

Across the Nile in Khartoum, two civilians were killed, and dozens injured in an air striker in an RSF-controlled area, the local emergency response room said, one of the hundreds of volunteer groups that coordinated emergency care throughout Sudan.

Although RSF has used drones in attacks, including Saturday, the fighter jets of the ordinary armed forces maintain a monopoly on air strikes.

Both the RSF and the army have been repeatedly accused of targeting civilians and without discrimination of residential areas.

In addition to killing tens of thousands of humans, the war has upset more than 12 million and decimated Sudan’s fragile infrastructure, forcing most health facilities out of operation.

Meters from the hospital

MSF’s Secretary General Chris Lockyear was at Al-Nao Hospital on Saturday, saying “Morgue is full of dead bodies”.

“I can see human, women and children who were torn down with wounded people who are in all sorts of spaces on the emergency that medicine does what they can,” he said in a statement.

A volunteer at the hospital told AFP It faced a serious lack of “blocks, blood donors and carriers to transport the wounded”.

Al-Nao, one of the last medical facilities operating in Redurman, has been repeatedly attacked.

According to the Sudanese doctors’ association, a shell fell “just meters away” from the hospital.

The union said most of the victims were women and children, and urged nurses and doctors in the area to go to the hospital to relieve a “serious shortage of medical staff”.

The battles in the capital come weeks after the army launched an offensive everywhere in central Sudan, who regains al-Jazira State Capital Wad Madani before putting its views on Khartoum.

RSF has since been in control of the road between Wad Madani and Khartoum, but on Saturday an army-allied militia’s control over the cities of Tamboul, Rufaa, Al-Hasaheisa and Al-Hilaliya, approx. 125 kilometers (77 miles) southeast of the capital.

The group, Sudan Shield Forces, is led by Abu Aqla Kaykal, who rejected from RSF last year and has been accused of atrocities against civilians both during his tenure with RSF and now on the army.

Sudan remains effectively split, with RSF in control of almost all of the great western region of Darfur and Swathes of the South and the army that control the country’s east and north.

Modoffensive

After months of steater Khartoum, the Army has broken RSF bays on several bases in the capital, including its headquarters, pushing the paramilitary increasingly into the outskirts of the city.

Witnesses said Saturday’s bombardment of Redurman came from the western outskirts of the city, where the RSF remains in control.

It came a day after the RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo promised to re -enter the capital.

“We expelled them (from Khartoum) before, and we will expel them again,” he told troops in a rare video address.

Greater Khartoum has been an important battlefield in almost 22 months of battle between the Army and RSF, and has been reduced to a shell of its former self.

A study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found that 26,000 people were killed in the capital alone between April 2023 and June 2024.

Whole neighborhoods have been taken over by warriors, while at least 3.6 million civilians have fled, according to the United Nations.

Those who are unable or unwilling to leave have reported frequent artillery fire in residential areas and widespread hunger in besieged neighborhoods blocked by opposite forces.

At least 106,000 people are estimated to suffer from famine in Khartoum, according to the non-supported integrated classification of the food safety phase, with an additional 3.2 million experiencing crisis levels of hunger.

Nationwide, famine has been declared in five areas – most of them in Darfur – and are expected to seize five more in May.