The Sudanese army was locked in heavy fighting on Saturday with paramilitaries who had advanced into the battleground Darfur city of El-Fasher the previous day, a military source said.
Residents said they were woken before dawn by heavy exchanges of machine-gun fire on the streets of the city of well over a million which has been under siege by the paramilitaries since May last year.
Regular army troops took back several key sites in the south and west of the city which the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) had captured on Friday, inflicting heavy losses on the paramilitaries, the military source said.
They included Shala prison and the headquarters of the Central Reserve Police, a militarised force trained for combat.
But a source in the RSF said both sites remained under the full control of the paramilitaries, along with the city’s livestock market.
The RSF had circulated videos late on Friday purporting to show its fighters in control of the sites, but AFP was unable to verify their authenticity.
El-Fasher is the last major city in Darfur still under the army’s control and has come under renewed attack by the paramilitaries this year since they lost control of the capital Khartoum.
Salah Issa, who lives in the central neighborhood of Awlad al-Rif, said that clashes had erupted at 3 am (0100 GMT).
“Yesterday’s (Friday’s) attack came from the south and west, and today they moved on the airport,” also in the west of the city, he said.
Another witness, Mohieddine Abdel Rahman, said the fighting had been at close quarters, using machine guns.
Activists said the renewed assault on the city had begun with heavy shelling on Tuesday evening, which continued all day Wednesday.
Eight civilians were killed when a RSF drone strike hit a bomb shelter, a doctor at El-Fasher Teaching Hospital told AFP on Thursday.
Comprehensive casualty tolls are almost impossible to establish.
The city is gripped by a communications blackout which only those with satellite internet connections can circumvent and nearly all health facilities have been forced to shut due to fighting.
The United Nations has repeatedly warned of the plight of the city’s trapped civilians, who are forced to seek shelter in makeshift bunkers dug in courtyards and in front of houses.
Nationwide ten of thousands of people have been killed since the war erupted in April 2023 and more than 14 million driven from their homes.
