Sporadic gunfire was heard Tuesday in Khartoum despite the entry into force of a new truce between the army and the paramilitaries, supposed to allow civilians to flee and humanitarian aid to be distributed in Sudan.
“Sporadic artillery fire” resounds in the capital of this poor East African country, a resident told AFP in the morning.
Shortly after the week-long truce came into effect at 7:45 p.m. GMT (3:45 p.m. EDT) Monday, other Khartoum residents reported fighting and airstrikes.
Tuesday afternoon, a precarious calm reigned in different neighborhoods as well as in several cities of Darfur, the western region most affected by the war with Khartoum, according to residents.
“We haven’t heard of air raids since the beginning of the truce,” a resident of southern Khartoum told AFP.
Since April 15, the war between the army, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane, and the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (FSR), of General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo, has claimed a thousand lives and more than one million displaced persons and refugees.
Both sides pledged to respect the ceasefire, but shortly before it came into effect, the UN reported “fighting and troop movements”.
“Beyond the official announcements, Sudan is still being bombed and millions of civilians are in danger,” said Karl Schembri, of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).
He denounced on Twitter “more than a month of broken promises”, after the failure of a dozen truces.
In Khartoum, a city of five million people, those who did not flee are surviving for the sixth consecutive week in searing heat, most without water, electricity and telecommunications.
“We are all hungry”
“We are all hungry, the children, the old, everyone is suffering from the war. We have no more water,” Souad al-Fateh, a resident of Khartoum, told AFP.
“The war has made this city uninhabitable: everything has been destroyed,” testifies Thouraya Mohammed, who hopes to be able to flee and take his father to a doctor.
The American and Saudi mediators had announced that they had obtained, after two weeks of negotiations in Saudi Arabia, a one-week truce.
The ceasefire would make it possible to restart services and hospitals and to replenish humanitarian aid stocks and looted or bombed markets, in this country where 25 of the 45 million inhabitants need assistance, according to the UN.
On Tuesday, the doctors’ union announced the closure of a new hospital in the greater suburbs of Khartoum. Caught in the crossfire, its staff was forced to stop working.
On the one hand, “several times, FSR fighters attacked patients and medical staff by shooting in the corridors of the hospital”, according to the union. On the other hand, high-ranking members of the regular army lead “a campaign of lies and rumours” against the doctors, who receive “threats”.
Again on Tuesday, the Ministry of Health, loyal to General Burhane, accused the FSR of having taken up residence in this same hospital and of having “attacked caregivers and patients” in another hospital, “and this, at 1 p.m.”, well after the truce came into effect.
Disused hospitals
If the army controls the air, it has few men in the center of the capital, while the RSF occupy the ground in Khartoum. Many residents accuse them of looting their homes or occupying them.
Doctors continue to warn about the tragic fate of hospitals: in Khartoum as in Darfur, they are almost all out of order. Those which have not been bombed have no more stocks or are occupied by belligerents.
Humanitarians are calling for secure corridors and this time, assure Riyadh and Washington, there will be “a ceasefire monitoring mechanism” bringing together representatives of both sides as well as the United States and Saudi Arabia.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken released a video overnight, assuring that “if the ceasefire is violated […]we will hold accountable those who violate it with our sanctions and other tools”.
If the conflict continues, a million additional Sudanese, according to the UN, could flee to neighboring countries which fear a contagion of violence.