RSF kills 116 people in Sudan’s Kalogi, including 46 children

Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have attacked a pre-school and other sites in the Kalogi locality of the state of South Kordofan, killing at least 116 people, according to a local official.

The executive director of the Kalogi locality told Al Jazeera on Saturday that the victims of the attack included 46 children who were attending the pre-school.

Two military sources in the government-aligned Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) also told Al Jazeera the RSF attacked the kindergarten on Thursday and later targeted civilians who had gathered to offer assistance amid the carnage.

The city’s hospital and a government building were also bombed, the sources said.

Communication blackouts in the area have made it difficult to report on the casualties, but there were fears the death toll could rise even further, the sources said.

“Killing children in their school is a horrific violation of children’s rights,” Sheldon Yett, UNICEF representative for Sudan, said in a statement on Friday.

“Children should never pay the price of conflict,” added Yett, urging all parties “to stop these attacks immediately and allow safe, unhindered access for humanitarian assistance to reach those in desperate need”.

‘Deliberate suicide drone attacks’

The Sudan Doctors Network initially reported on Thursday that at least nine people were killed, including four children and two women, in “deliberate suicide-drone attacks carried out in Kalogi town” carried out by the RSF and its ally, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement–North (al-Hilou), on the kindergarten and several civilian facilities.

“This attack constitutes a grave violation of international humanitarian law and is a continuation of the targeting of civilians and vital infrastructure,” the group said.

In a follow-up statement on Friday, the group said paramedics reporting to the scene were also targeted in the “second unexpected attack”.

Al Jazeera’s Hiba Morgan, reporting from Khartoum, said the death toll has continued to rise after the initial reports because of the difficulty in getting medical assistance to those wounded in the attacks.

It is the latest instance of alleged RSF atrocities against civilians in the ongoing brutal civil war, now deep into its third year, pitting the SAF against the paramilitary RSF. The SAF has also been accused of committing atrocities in the war.

Morgan added that Kordofan has become the “scene of intense fighting between the army and the RSF in the past few weeks” following last month’s fall of el-Fasher, the army’s last major city in the Darfur region in western Sudan.

Kordofan is “quite strategic for both sides”, she said.

The region sits between RSF-controlled Darfur in the west and government-held territory in the east and north, serving as a vital corridor that links the warring factions’ heartlands.

Control of major cities like el-Obeid would give the RSF a direct route towards the capital Khartoum, which government forces recaptured earlier this year.

“For the army, maintaining control of Kordofan means it can protect its bases in the central, northern and eastern parts of the country and that it can launch attacks on RSF-controlled Darfur,” Morgan added.

‘History repeating itself’

The war, now in its third year, has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced more than nine million and left some 30 million in need of the humanitarian aid, according to officials and the United Nations.

On Thursday, the UN’s human rights chief Volker Turk warned that the Kordofan region of Sudan could face a wave of mass atrocities similar to the widespread killings documented in the Darfur city of el-Fasher, which fell to the RSF last month.

“It is truly shocking to see history repeating itself in Kordofan so soon after the horrific events in el-Fasher,” Turk said, urging global powers to prevent the region from suffering a similar fate.

Since late October, when the paramilitary RSF captured Bara, in North Kordofan state, the UN has documented at least 269 civilian deaths from aerial bombardment, artillery fire and summary killings.

Communication blackouts across the region mean the actual toll is possibly far higher, with reports emerging of revenge attacks, arbitrary detentions, sexual violence and the forced recruitment of children.

The RSF claimed control of the West Kordofan city of Babnusa earlier this week, with footage showing its fighters moving through the military base there. The army denied that the city had fallen.

Before el-Fasher fell in November, the UN issued urgent warnings about potential atrocities, but those alerts went largely unheeded. After the city’s capture, mass killings ensued, with corpses visible from satellite imagery, prompting UN chief Antonio Guterres to describe it as a “crime scene”.

Amnesty International has since called for war crimes investigations, and the European Union has placed sanctions on Abdelrahim Dagalo, the RSF’s deputy and brother of the group’s chief, Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo.