AT LEAST 91 civilians were killed within 10 days last month in Sudan’s besieged city of el-Fasher in attacks by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the United Nations said on Thursday.

The series of attacks were the latest in the intensified fighting between the army and rival paramilitaries seeking to control the city as civil war rages on.

The war between the RSF and the military began in 2023 when tensions erupted between the two previous allies that were meant to oversee a democratic transition after a 2019 uprising.

The fighting has killed at least 40,000 people, according to the World Health Organisation, and displaced as many as 12 million others. Over 24 million people are facing acute food insecurity, according to the World Food Programme.

El-Fasher is the military’s last stronghold in the sprawling Darfur region, which has been the epicentre of the violence along with Kordofan.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said Thursday that the city’s Daraga Oula neighbourhood in the west of el-Fasher city has been repeatedly attacked by RSF artillery shelling, drone strikes and ground incursions between September 19 and 29. 

The resistance committees in el-Fasher, a network of community members and activists tracking the fighting and war-related abuses, reported similar attacks, it said on Wednesday.

Mr Turk called for urgent action to prevent “large-scale, ethnically driven attacks and atrocities in el-Fasher.”

In its latest attack targeting residential neighbourhoods on Wednesday, the RSF fired a missile that killed 16 people and injured 21 people, including five children, the Sudan Doctors Network said, calling the attacks a “massacre.”

The Sudanese military said in a statement that it caused losses for the RSF in the city the day before and “killed a large number of mercenaries from Colombia and Ukraine.” The army said the mercenaries included engineers specialised in drone systems.

The RSF did not immediately respond for comment.