Repeated strikes on a kindergarten and hospital in Sudan killed 114 people, including 63 children, and targeted the responders who were trying to get the wounded to safety, the World Health Organization said on Monday.
The attack was the kind of mass atrocity that has marked Sudan’s two-and-a-half year civil war, in which civilians and civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, have faced relentless attack. The massacre also shows the movement of the front line from the western Darfur region into the central Kordofan region.
Initial accounts said missiles fired from drones were used in the attack on multiple targets in the town of Kalogi in South Kordofan state last Thursday. Most of the children killed reportedly died in a strike on the kindergarten, and the hospital was hit at least three times, Tedros Ghebreyasus, the W.H.O. director general, said in a statement posted on X on Monday.
“Disturbingly, paramedics and responders came under attack as they tried to move the injured from the kindergarten to the hospital,” he said.
In addition to the dead, 35 people were injured, many of them parents and others who had rushed to help the victims.
Sudan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a medical organization, Sudan Doctors Network, said the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces carried out the attacks, which the doctors condemned as a war crime.
Earlier atrocities attributed to the R.S.F. include the massacre of thousands of civilians as they overran the city of El Fasher last month. Witnesses said the fighters shot hundreds of patients and civilians as they sheltered in the city’s maternity hospital.
Since the capture of El Fasher, the last stronghold of the army in Darfur, R.S.F. forces have advanced into central and southern Kordofan region, which provides a buffer between the army’s main base in eastern states, including the capital Khartoum.
The R.S.F. said Monday it had seized the country’s largest oil field, in a potentially significant strategic victory that could give the paramilitary a stranglehold on oil exports from neighboring South Sudan.
The group posted videos of its fighters inside the oil field, known as Heglig, at the southern end of the resource-rich Kordofan region, along the border with South Sudan.
A senior official with Sudan’s military-dominated government said its forces had withdrawn from Heglig on Sunday, ostensibly to avoid fighting that might damage oil plants in the region. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military movements.
In a statement, the R.S.F. described the capture of Heglig as a “pivotal point in the liberation of the entire homeland.” Whether the paramilitary can hold the territory remains to be seen — some areas have changed hands repeatedly during the war.
Keeping Heglig would not only boost the group’s campaign for control of Kordofan, but also offer valuable leverage over neighboring South Sudan, a key supply route for the R.S.F.
One of the world’s poorest countries, South Sudan has depended almost entirely on oil for government revenue since it seceded from Sudan in 2011. Until recently, much of that oil was processed at a facility in Heglig before being shipped across Sudan via pipeline to the Red Sea for export.
South Sudanese oil production has slumped, however, as a result of Sudan’s war. Fighting shut down parts of the pipeline and caused foreign oil firms to pull out. The Sudan Tribune reported on Sunday that the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation, which operates an oil field in Kordofan, intends to leave Sudan by Dec. 31, ending three decades of operations in the country.
The R.S.F. imports fuel and other war supplies through Sudan’s porous border with South Sudan. In the other direction, the R.S.F. smuggles illicit gold through South Sudan that, experts say, plays a key role in financing its war effort.
Declan Walsh is the chief Africa correspondent for The Times based in Nairobi, Kenya. He previously reported from Cairo, covering the Middle East, and Islamabad, Pakistan.
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