AFP, Port Sudan

Artillery shelling and air strikes killed at least 56 people across greater Khartoum on Saturday, according to a medical source and Sudanese activists.

Sudan’s regular army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been locked in a battle for power since April 2023 that has intensified this month as the army fights to take all of the capital Khartoum and its sister cities of Omdurman and Khartoum North.

RSF shelling killed 54 people at a busy market in Omdurman on Saturday, overwhelming the city’s Al-Nao Hospital, a medical source told AFP.

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

Across the Nile in Khartoum, two civilians were killed and dozens wounded in an air strike on an RSF-controlled area, the local Emergency Response Room (ERR) said.

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

The ERR is one of hundreds of volunteer committees across Sudan coordinating emergency care.

In addition to killing tens of thousands of people, the war has uprooted more than 12 million and forced most health facilities out of service.

A volunteer at Al-Nao Hospital told AFP it faced dire shortages of “shrouds, blood donors and stretchers to transport the wounded”.

The hospital is one of the last medical facilities operating in Omdurman and has been repeatedly attacked.

After months of stalemate in greater Khartoum, the army retook several bases in Khartoum last month, including its pre-war headquarters, pushing the RSF increasingly into the city’s outskirts.

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

A resident of a southern neighbourhood reported rocket and artillery fire on the city’s streets.