AI-generated
Conflict AP · BBC · Aug 3, 2026 A Sudanese army drone strike hits a civil court session in Darfur, killing at least 35, a rights group says A drone strike blamed on Sudan's army hit a civil court session in a paramilitary-held Darfur village, killing at least 35 people, a rights group said. The army did not comment on claims that civilians were among the dead. The attack came amid the country's grinding war between the army and the Rapid Support Forces. Analogies The massacre at Mycalessus (413 BC) The Thracians bursting into Mycalessus sacked the houses and temples, and butchered the inhabitants, sparing neither youth nor age, but killing all they fell in with, one after the other, children and women, and even beasts of burden... and in particular they attacked a boys' school, the largest that there was in the place, into which the children had just gone, and massacred them all. In short, the disaster falling upon the whole town was unsurpassed in magnitude, and unapproached by any in suddenness and in horror.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book VII.29 (trans. Richard Crawley, 1874); Project Gutenberg → The bombing of Guernica (1937) Guernica, the most ancient town of the Basques and the centre of their cultural tradition, was completely destroyed yesterday afternoon by insurgent air raiders... The object of the bombardment was seemingly the demoralization of the civil population and the destruction of the cradle of the Basque race.
George L. Steer, eyewitness dispatch on the destruction of Guernica, The Times (London), 28 April 1937 → The slaying of Priam at the altar Then Pyrrhus thus: 'Go thou from me to fate, / And to my father my foul deeds relate. / Now die!' With that he dragg'd the trembling sire, / Slidd'ring thro' clotter'd blood and holy mire, / (The mingled paste his murder'd son had made,) / Haul'd from beneath the violated shade, / And on the sacred pile the royal victim laid... Thus Priam fell, and shar'd one common fate / With Troy in ashes, and his ruin'd state
Virgil, Aeneid, Book II (trans. John Dryden, 1697); Project Gutenberg → The murdered child of Troy Behold, you hapless wives of Troy, the corpse of Astyanax, whom the Danaids have cruelly slain by hurling him from the battlements.
Euripides, The Trojan Women (trans. E. P. Coleridge, 1891); Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University → The Third of May 1808 Goya freezes the instant before the volley: a rank of faceless soldiers levels muskets at a knot of unarmed townspeople herded to a hillside in the dark. A man in a white shirt flings his arms wide in a cruciform gesture of terror and defiance, lit by a single lantern, while the already-shot lie in their blood at his feet and others cover their eyes. There is no glory in it, only the mechanical execution of the defenseless.
Francisco de Goya, The Third of May 1808 (El tres de mayo de 1808 en Madrid), 1814, oil on canvas; Museo del Prado, Madrid → Pillaging and Burning of a Village In Callot's densely etched panorama, soldiers pour through a village, putting houses and church to the torch as columns of smoke boil into the sky. In the foreground troops run through unarmed peasants, drag women by the hair, and loot a burning home; the ordinary countryside has become a killing ground. Made amid the Thirty Years' War, the plate is a cold indictment of the routine savagery visited on noncombatants.
Jacques Callot, 'Pillage et incendie d'un village' (Pillaging and Burning of a Village), plate 7 of Les Misères et les Malheurs de la Guerre, 1633, etching; impression at The Metropolitan Museum of Art → 
