Port Sudan (Sudan) (AFP) - A paramilitary attack on a market in the Sudanese city of El-Fasher killed 18 people, a medical source told AFP on Friday, after world leaders appealed for an end to the country’s wartime suffering.

The Rapid Support Forces’ shelling of the market on Thursday evening also injured dozens, activists said separately, as the paramilitaries and regular army vie for control of the North Darfur state capital, 17 months into their war in the northeast African country.

“We received last night at the hospital 18 dead,” some of them burned and others killed with severe shrapnel injuries, the source at El-Fasher Teaching Hospital told AFP, requesting anonymity for their own protection.

The plight of Sudan, and El-Fasher in particular, has been under discussion this week at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

“We must compel the warring parties to accept humanitarian pauses in El-Fasher, Khartoum and other highly vulnerable areas,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the UN, said on Wednesday.

The Teaching Hospital is one of the last still receiving patients in El-Fasher, where reports of a “full-scale assault” by RSF last weekend led UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to call for an urgent ceasefire.

The paramilitaries have besieged El-Fasher since May, and famine has already been declared in Zamzam refugee camp near the city of two million.

Paramilitary “artillery shelling continued this morning” on residential neighbourhoods and the market, the local resistance committee said on Friday.

The committee, which reported the dozens of wounded in Thursday’s market attack, is one of hundreds of pro-democracy volunteer groups across Sudan that provide crucial aid to civilians caught in the crossfire.

- ‘Stop arming generals’ -

Sudan’s war has killed tens of thousands of people. The World Health Organization cited a toll of at least 20,000 but United States envoy Tom Perriello has said some estimates reach 150,000.

US President Joe Biden, who raised particular concern over the assault on El-Fasher, on Tuesday urged all countries to cut off weapons supplies to the country’s rival generals, Sudanese Armed Forces chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.

“The world needs to stop arming the generals,” Biden told the UN General Assembly.

On the sidelines of the UN talks, Guterres met with Burhan, expressing concern about “escalation” and the risk of “a regional spillover,” the UN said.

Both sides have been repeatedly accused of war crimes.

The RSF, descended from Darfur’s Janjaweed militia, have specifically been accused of crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.

Darfur, a region the size of France, is home to around a quarter of Sudan’s population but over half of its 10 million internally displaced persons.

Daglo released a video Thursday evening addressing the UN gathering, rejecting Burhan’s participation as Sudan’s representative and saying the RSF had “formed a force to protect civilians” and was “open to all initiatives” aimed at peace.

Also on Thursday, air strikes and shelling rocked Khartoum as the army attacked paramilitary positions across the Sudanese capital, witnesses and a military source said.

- Women at risk -

The sounds of gunfire and artillery shelling continued to ring through the city on Friday, witnesses told AFP, with one reporting “a cloud of smoke” rising over army-controlled areas of Khartoum.

Just south of the capital, in the agricultural state of Al-Jazira, paramilitary forces attacked army positions Friday with artillery shelling and drone strikes, prompting retaliatory army air strikes, according to an RSF source who spoke to AFP on condition of anonymity.

An army source confirmed the fighting in Al-Jazira.

A hallmark of the war, which has mostly been fought in densely populated areas, has been mass human rights violations including systematic sexual violence, summary executions and the looting of humanitarian aid often by the paramilitaries.

A UN Women report published Thursday showed that as of December, some 6.7 million people in Sudan were in need of services related to gender-based violence, but “this figure is estimated to be even higher today”.

Sudan, which is facing what the UN called on Wednesday “the world’s largest hunger crisis”, is home to 5.8 internally displaced women and girls, who UN Women said were acutely vulnerable.

As famine threatens displaced populations across the country, “women are eating least and last”, the report warned.

Fears have mounted that intensified fighting in Darfur will herald a new wave of horrific violence by paramilitaries, particularly impacting women and girls, displaced communities and ethnic minorities.

The UN’s human rights chief, Volker Turk, warned on Thursday that, “if El-Fasher falls, there is a high risk of ethnically-targeted violations and abuses, including summary executions and sexual violence, by the RSF and allied militia.”