ON December 9, an army air attack hit a fuel station in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, killing at least 28 people and injuring scores.
The army said it was targeting fighters from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group that it has been at war with since April 2023.
Speaking weeks after the attack, Mohamed Kandasha, a medic in the area, remembers treating people with severe burns at a nearby hospital.
There were men, women and children among them, a symbol of the indiscriminate nature of the attacks committed by both sides in Sudan’s war.
“The RSF doesn’t care about civilians and neither does the army,” he told Al Jazeera.
More than 26,000 people were killed from April 2023 to June 2024 in Khartoum state alone as thousands more died of conflict-related causes such as disease and starvation, according to a study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Since the army announced a major offensive to take back Khartoum from the RSF on September 25, the humanitarian crisis has worsened.
Recent fighting has led to extrajudicial killings, indiscriminate strikes that have killed scores of civilians and increased danger for local relief workers.
The army and RSF are former bedfellows who cooperated to sabotage a democratic transition after their former boss, President Omar al-Bashir, was toppled by popular protests in April 2019.
Four years later, the RSF and army turned on each other in a bid for supremacy. After the first year of fighting, the RSF captured most of Khartoum and appeared to have the upper hand in the conflict.
Then, in early October, the army recaptured several strategic neighbourhoods and three bridges in the national capital region, which comprises three cities, Khartoum, Khartoum North and Omdurman.
As fighting drags on, civilian casualties seem to be rising exponentially, said Mohamad Osman, a Sudan researcher for Human Rights Watch.
“Since October, there has been a significant uptick in violence,” he told Al Jazeera.
“I think we’re seeing so many more barrel bombs being used in Khartoum as well as drones, rockets and ground rockets,” Osman added.
Barrel bombs are unguided bombs packed with explosives and shrapnel and dropped indiscriminately from helicopters and planes.
Throughout the war, rights groups and United Nations experts have accused both sides of committing abuses such as executing prisoners of war, carrying out summary killings and torturing detainees.
The RSF has been accused of ethnically cleansing communities in the western region of Darfur and systematically gang-raping women and girls, according to Human Rights Watch, Al Jazeera’s own reporting and local monitors.
