A drone strike on a market in Nyala kills more than 100 people, a Sudanese rights group says

The market in the Dumaya neighborhood of Nyala was full on Monday evening, with traders, restaurant workers and residents eating and doing business, when the drone struck at about 8 p.m.

Emergency Lawyers, a Sudanese rights group that monitors the war, put the toll at more than 100 people killed and 113 wounded, and said many of the dead were women and children. Dr. Alaa al Din Nugud, health minister in the administration aligned with the Rapid Support Forces in South Darfur, gave a precise figure of 102 civilians killed and 113 injured and said hospitals were placed on full alert. The group blamed the Sudanese army for the strike and called for an independent investigation. “This massacre turned a civilian market into a scene of mass killing and widespread injuries,” the group said.

The hospital count tells a different part of the same night. Doctors Without Borders, known as MSF, supports Nyala Teaching Hospital. MSF said its teams received the bodies of 36 people, 21 of them in civilian clothing, and treated more than 150 wounded patients in the emergency room, many with shrapnel injuries and severe burns. The wounded arrived on tuk tuks and donkey carts. MSF said a second strike also hit a civilian neighborhood the same evening. A medical worker at the hospital separately gave a news agency a lower count of at least 21 people killed and more than 40 wounded, and said he could not say how many of the victims were fighters. The three counts differ and none has been independently verified, as of October 28. Witnesses who spoke to the Associated Press on Wednesday said civilian vendors were among the dead, people who had gathered at the market to sell food to paramilitary fighters.

Nyala is the capital of South Darfur and is held by the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group that has fought the Sudanese army since April 2023. The war has spread deep into Darfur this year. The United Nations counts about 34 million people in Sudan, roughly two thirds of the population, in need of humanitarian assistance, the largest crisis of its kind in the world. A market is where a city under siege eats. Whatever the final toll of Monday strike turns out to be, the people who died at Tanqong were buying and selling food when it fell.