A bloody attack was carried out on Monday through an airstrike targeting a crowded market in the western region of the country, resulting in hundreds of casualties, according to local monitoring groups, who described the attack as a war crime.
Videos and images from the aftermath of the airstrike in Tura, a small town in northern Darfur, showed dozens of charred bodies and scattered human remains over a vast area engulfed in flames in the town’s market.
According to a report by the American newspaper The New York Times, this crime adds to other atrocities reported in Darfur.
The location of the videos was geographically pinpointed in Tura by the Witness Project of the Information Resilience Center, a nonprofit organization documenting potential war crimes. Satellite images and data from NASA satellites monitoring fires confirmed that an area of about 10,000 square meters had burned on Monday.
Due to the difficulty in estimating the scale of human losses from the horrific attack carried out by the Sudanese army, one Sudanese monitoring group reported dozens of deaths, while the international human rights organization Avaaz estimated, based on local groups’ reports, the death toll to be over 200.
Analysis by The New York Times of the footage, showing several pockets of burnt land across the market, indicated multiple explosions. In a video filmed at the scene, an eyewitness stated that four rockets hit the market, one targeting its center and three others hitting the outskirts.
Eyewitnesses confirmed that the attack came from the air, as Sudanese warplanes, which are owned by the Sudanese army, have carried out other airstrikes in the region recently, according to The New York Times.
The American newspaper noted that the Sudanese army has often been accused of indiscriminate shelling in areas controlled by the Rapid Support Forces, which has frequently resulted in dozens being killed in a single strike. Most of these attacks have also occurred in Darfur.
