A drone strike at a market in Sudan’s West Darfur region near the border with Chad on Thursday killed four people and wounded more than two dozen civilians, Doctors Without Borders said.
The medical group, known as MSF, said the drone hit fuel reserves at the Adikong border market. MSF said it was the second fatal drone strike in Adikong in less than a month.
MSF head of mission in Chad, Gado Mahamadou, said 23 people were injured, including seven children and four women.
The AP reported that the Sudanese military had not released an official statement about the Thursday strike. Two officials told the AP that there were military operations in the area meant to target the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, and the officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, known as OCHA, warned that increasing drone strikes across Sudan “are exacting a growing toll on civilians.”
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said he was appalled by the increasing drone attacks, citing reports that more than 200 civilians have been killed by drones since March 4 alone in the Kordofan region and in White Nile state.
The AP also reported that on Wednesday, a drone blamed on the RSF struck a secondary school and a health care center in southern Sudan in White Nile province, killing at least 17 people, mostly schoolgirls.
Sudan plunged into war in April 2023 after simmering tensions between the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and the army broke out into fighting in Khartoum and spread across the country. The AP reported that U.N. figures say the war has killed more than 40,000 people, but aid groups say the true number could be many times higher.
Darfur and Kordofan became epicenters of the fighting, with deadly drone attacks frequently reported in Kordofan, where analysts and humanitarian workers say the attacks have surged and harmed civilians and complicated aid operations.