PORT SUDAN: A UN convoy delivering aid to the besieged city of El-Fasher in Sudan’s famine-stricken western Darfur region was attacked, UNICEF said Tuesday, with initial reports indicating multiple casualties.
The convoy, including trucks from the UN children’s agency and World Food Programme, was in Al-Koma, North Darfur, “waiting for approval to proceed to El-Fasher” when it came under attack on Monday, UNICEF spokesperson Eva Hinds told AFP.
She did not specify who was behind the attack.
For more than two years, Africa’s third-largest country has been engulfed by a war between the army, led by the nation’s de facto leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces led by his erstwhile ally, Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.
The two sides traded blame over Monday’s attack.
The army-aligned government said the trucks were targeted by drones from the RSF, which in turn accused the army of the attack.
Civilians in El-Fasher, the only state capital in the vast Darfur region outside RSF control, have suffered under a brutal RSF siege for more than a year.
Paramilitary attacks on the city have intensified in recent months, as the RSF seeks to consolidate its hold on all of Darfur after losing Sudan’s capital Khartoum in March.
The RSF has repeatedly shelled the city and its surrounding famine-stricken displacement camps, killing hundreds of civilians and displacing hundreds of thousands.
In a statement, the army-aligned government said the RSF targeted the UN aid trucks with drones in “a deliberate attempt to block humanitarian teams and obstruct their work in delivering aid”.
The RSF meanwhile accused the army of this “brutal attack”, saying the convoy was hit by a military aircraft.
Both sides have been accused of using starvation as a weapon of war and looting or obstructing aid.
The war, which broke out in April 2023, has killed tens of thousands, displaced 13 million and created what the UN describes as the world’s worst displacement and hunger crises.
In North Darfur state alone, more than a million people are on the brink of mass starvation, according to UN figures.
