Strong explosions rocked Khartoum on Wednesday, 26e day of the war for power in Sudan between the military and paramilitaries, without any progress in the negotiations on humanitarian corridors to evacuate thousands of people living in fear.
“We were awakened by explosions and heavy artillery fire,” a resident of Omdurman, a city on the outskirts of Khartoum, told AFP.
During the night, other witnesses in different areas of Khartoum heard two huge explosions. Later, Sudanese reported street fighting in the north of the capital, which has a population of five million.
Residents of El-Obeid, 350 km west of Khartoum, also reported clashes and explosions in their town.
The army led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane and the feared paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo sent negotiators to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on Saturday for ‘pre-discussions’ only “technical” relating to safe corridors for humanitarian aid.
But so far no announcement has been made. The head of the UN for humanitarian affairs, Martin Griffiths, who arrived in Jeddah on Sunday, has already left.
He proposed to the two parties to commit to “guarantee the passage of humanitarian aid” via a declaration of principle, according to the UN.
Since the beginning of the conflict on April 15, the fighting has left more than 750 dead and 5,000 injured, according to NGOs and the authorities.
The UN estimates that nearly 177,000 people have taken refuge in neighboring countries, according to a latest report, while the number of displaced people inside Sudan now exceeds 700,000, more than double the number 340,000 identified a week ago.
Those who remain in Khartoum live barricaded in their homes. Without water or electricity, with very little food and less and less cash, they survive in the overwhelming heat thanks to networks of solidarity between neighbors and relatives.
80,000 displaced women
Faced with the emergency, the international community calls on the two generals to let in humanitarian aid and allow civilians caught in the crossfire to seek shelter.
Almost no hospital is functioning in the capital where, according to the UN, “24,000 women are due to give birth in the coming weeks” and among the displaced, warns the same source, “more than 80,000 are women, of whom 8,000 are pregnant”.
Before the war, one in three Sudanese suffered from hunger. If the war continues, up to 2.5 million more people will go hungry daily, the UN predicts.
According to an AFP correspondent, two Saudi planes loaded with humanitarian aid landed on Tuesday in the coastal city of Port Sudan, spared from the violence, where the UN and a growing number of NGOs are trying to negotiate the delivery of these shipments to areas where hospitals and humanitarian stocks have been looted or bombed.
In Darfur, a border region of Chad, the NGO Islamic Relief recounts in a press release released Wednesday the desolation observed by its teams: “In Zalingei, the capital of central Darfur, food stocks are dwindling as the market was plundered”.
And “nearly 250,000 people have been displaced in Darfur while armed groups kill and attack civilians, loot the premises and the trucks of humanitarian workers”, adds the NGO.
Civilians have been armed in Darfur to participate in clashes mixing military, paramilitary and tribal or rebel fighters, according to the UN.
This region was marked by the bloody civil war started in 2003 between the dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir and ethnic minorities.
In 2019, the army agreed under pressure from the street to dismiss Mr. Bashir, in power for 30 years.
In 2021, Generals Burhane and Daglo committed a putsch that ended the fragile democratic transition by ousting civilians from power.
But their agreement split on the question of the integration of the FSR in the army.