CAIRO (Reuters) -A pro-democracy group said Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) killed at least 22 people in an attack on the city of al-Fashir in the western Darfur region on Saturday, though the paramilitary force denied launching an assault.
The al-Fashir Resistance Committees said on Facebook that the RSF had fired artillery shells on markets, hospitals and apartments in a surge of violence after weeks of stalemate on that front in the country’s civil war.
The activist group also said the RSF used a drone to target a hospital.
It later said a total of 97 people were killed or injured in the assault.
The RSF dismissed the report and said it did not clash with the army or allied groups in al-Fashir.
The city is the national army’s last remaining position in the Darfur region, and a key front in its war with the RSF that has turned Sudan into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
More than 300,000 people have fled their homes in al-Fashir as a result of fighting that began in April, the United Nations has said.
(Reporting by Hatem Maher and Nafisa Eltahir; editing by Giles Elgood and Andrew Heavens)