Beirut, Lebanon – On December 9, an army air attack hit a fuel station in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, killing at least 28 people and injuring scores.
The army said it was targeting fighters from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group that it has been at war with since April 2023.
Speaking weeks after the attack, Mohamed Kandasha, a medic in the area, remembers treating people with severe burns at a nearby hospital.
There were men, women and children among them, a symbol of the indiscriminate nature of the attacks committed by both sides in Sudan’s war.
“The RSF doesn’t care about civilians and neither does the army,” he told Al Jazeera.
Escalating violence
More than 26,000 people were killed from April 2023 to June 2024 in Khartoum state alone as thousands more died of conflict-related causes such as disease and starvation, according to a study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Since the army announced a major offensive to take back Khartoum from the RSF on September 25, the humanitarian crisis has worsened.
Recent fighting has led to extrajudicial killings, indiscriminate strikes that have killed scores of civilians and increased danger for local relief workers.
The army and RSF are former bedfellows who cooperated to sabotage a democratic transition after their former boss, President Omar al-Bashir, was toppled by popular protests in April 2019.
Four years later, the RSF and army turned on each other in a bid for supremacy. After the first year of fighting, the RSF captured most of Khartoum and appeared to have the upper hand in the conflict.
Then, in early October, the army recaptured several strategic neighbourhoods and three bridges in the national capital region, which comprises three cities, Khartoum, Khartoum North and Omdurman.
As fighting drags on, civilian casualties seem to be rising exponentially, said Mohamad Osman, a Sudan researcher for Human Rights Watch.
“Since October, there has been a significant uptick in violence,” he told Al Jazeera.
“I think we’re seeing so many more barrel bombs being used in Khartoum as well as drones, rockets and ground rockets,” Osman added.
Barrel bombs are unguided bombs packed with explosives and shrapnel and dropped indiscriminately from helicopters and planes.
Throughout the war, rights groups and United Nations experts have accused both sides of committing abuses such as executing prisoners of war, carrying out summary killings and torturing detainees.
The RSF has been accused of ethnically cleansing communities in the western region of Darfur and systematically gang-raping women and girls, according to Human Rights Watch, Al Jazeera’s own reporting and local monitors.
Major violations
After the army captured Khartoum’s Halfaya neighbourhood in early October, most inhabitants rejoiced to be rid of a year and a half of RSF abuses and atrocities.
However, reports soon emerged alleging that dozens of men suspected of affiliation with the RSF had been killed after the army advance.
“This is beyond despicable and contravenes all human rights norms and standards,” Radhouane Nouicer, a UN expert on Sudan, said in a statement.
“The incident happened when people were still celebrating that the army had liberated them,” said Mokhtar Atif, spokesperson for an Emergency Response Room (ERR), a local relief effort aiding civilians.
“The army killed these people … because they thought they were working with the RSF,” he told Al Jazeera from France, where he is now based.
Sudanese army spokesperson Nabil Abdullah denied responsibility for the incident and said the army never strikes civilians, adding that sometimes RSF fighters pretend to be civilians when they are wounded by air strikes.
“We don’t commit violations against civilians. The militia [RSF] are the ones that target civilians by killing them, displacing them, and looting and robbing their belongings,” Abdullah told Al Jazeera.
On December 10, the army-aligned governor of Khartoum said the RSF killed 65 people in Omdurman.
Witnesses decried the attack as an act of “terrorism”.
“Whenever the army advances on the RSF, the paramilitary responds by killing civilians,” said Badawi, a local relief worker who declined to give his last name due to the sensitivity of speaking to reporters in a warzone.
Al Jazeera emailed questions to the RSF’s media office asking it to respond to reports that the RSF deliberately targets civilians. The media office had not responded by the time of publication.
Endangered and overwhelmed
Human rights monitors, NGOs and analysts all accuse the army of prohibiting relief agencies from carrying out humanitarian operations in RSF-controlled regions.
They also blame the RSF for generating a hunger crisis by looting aid and food markets, attacking farmland to ruin harvests, and taxing and obstructing aid convoys.
“Both SAF and RSF, along with their foreign supporters, are responsible for what is an apparent deliberate use of starvation, constituting crimes against humanity and war crimes under international law,” a panel of UN experts on Sudan said in October.
Civilians in RSF areas rely almost entirely on ERRs, a network of community relief groups that have spearheaded the humanitarian response since the war began, local and international relief workers told Al Jazeera.
On Thursday, ERRs cooperated with the World Food Programme (WFP) and UNICEF to finally bring in 28 truckloads of lifesaving aid.
It was the first time the WFP had delivered aid into RSF areas in Khartoum from army-controlled areas, Hajooj Kuka, spokesperson for Khartoum’s ERRs, said.
But both sides in the war still target relief workers.
Civilians in Khartoum North are particularly vulnerable now that the area is an epicentre of conflict, said Atif, the ERR spokesperson.
He told Al Jazeera that of the 69 local relief workers killed in the war by the army and RSF, at least 30 were from Khartoum North.
On top of that, relief workers are struggling to evacuate civilians in Khartoum North after an RSF commander ordered several neighbourhoods – and thousands of people – to leave this month, Atif said.
Roads out of Khartoum North are dangerous due to army air attacks and the presence of RSF fighters, whom rights groups accuse of robbing and killing indiscriminately and raping women and girls at random.
“There is so much random army fire on the roads, and the RSF being there … means anything can happen to us,” said a relief worker in Khartoum North whose identity Al Jazeera is not publishing to protect the person.
Safe exit?
The only safe road out of Khartoum North is to Sharq el-Nile (East Nile), where relief workers are already overwhelmed by absorbing thousands of people fleeing Gezira state, where the RSF has been carrying out near-daily killings since capturing it a year ago, local activists and witnesses said.
The ERR has only been able to evacuate about 200 people from Khartoum North to Sharq el-Nile due mainly to a lack of resources, said Atif, pleading for NGOs or UN agencies to support the Khartoum North ERR by intervening to protect civilians.
Carrying out evacuations without the army’s approval can be dangerous and lead to restricted access for aid groups, Osman said.
Last year, the army acknowledged attacking a humanitarian convoy belonging to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which was going to rescue about 100 people from an active conflict zone in Khartoum, according to the Sudan Tribune.
The attack killed two aid workers and injured seven people.
In Sharq el-Nile, the RSF arrested several ERR volunteers without an identifiable reason, Atif said.
He speculated that some RSF fighters were looking to collect a quick ransom and intimidate the ERR.
“These are just civilians helping their communities. There is no reason for them to be in danger,” Atif told Al Jazeera.
“The opposite should happen. They should be granted access, money and permits [to do their work].”