A strike on Nyala’s cattle market killed 30, and nobody has claimed it

The strike hit the Al-Mawashi livestock market in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur and the Rapid Support Forces' principal rear-area city, on Friday 16 October. A medical source cited by AFP put the toll at 30 killed and 47 wounded, a figure carried by The New Arab and reported independently by Radio Tamazuj, which attributed it to a medical source of its own. It has not been independently verified. The RSF blamed the Sudanese Armed Forces; per AFP, a military source acknowledged an uptick in strikes on the area without claiming responsibility for the market. On the same day the SAF said it had destroyed RSF command-and-control centres in Nyala and killed dozens of fighters, releasing a photograph of a damaged building dated 16 October that Sudan Tribune published. Al Jazeera framed the day as competing claims. The RSF-aligned Sudan Founding Alliance, Tasis, said through spokesman Ahmed Tugod Lissan that the strike hit the market while it was crowded with civilians; Tasis is a belligerent, not a monitor.

Two further incidents in Kordofan in the same window were also attributed to the army. Sudan Tribune reported on 16 October that five children were killed and their mother wounded when an Antonov bombed a home in Abu Zaima, North Kordofan; the aircraft identification is the outlet’s, not an admission, and no SAF comment was captured. On 17 October the same paper reported four killed and several wounded, some critically, in a drone strike on a civilian vehicle at Ankoush in West Kordofan near Al-Fula, sourced to the Kordofan Observatory, a local monitor, and hedged in its own headline. Separately, The National reported on 16 October that the UN had called for an immediate halt to drone attacks, warning that drones have become the leading cause of civilian casualties in Sudan this year. The report did not name the official who said it, and The Files has not seen the dataset behind the claim.

Assessment: Three alleged army strikes in 48 hours cuts against the international framing of the RSF as the sole perpetrator of air-delivered civilian harm — but note what the evidence actually is: one unnamed medical source, one single-outlet report, one local monitor. The SAF’s counter-claim rests on army-supplied imagery, which is no better. Nyala is the RSF’s logistics capital, so a strike there is militarily legible; that makes neither account implausible, and both sides know it. Watch the drone-ban idea rather than the truce talk. A mutual halt would cost the SAF its one asymmetric advantage over a force that holds more ground, which is why it will not be agreed.