(Khartoum) An explosion felt for several kilometers around Thursday hit the vicinity of the Sudanese army headquarters in Khartoum, where fighting between soldiers and paramilitaries continues on the second day of the Muslim holiday of Eid al- Adha, according to locals.
Huge columns of smoke rose above this complex located in the center of the capital, where several million inhabitants live without water and electricity, in an exhausting heat.
Residents living seven kilometers from the center “felt the walls shaking,” one of them told AFP.
The cause of the explosion was not immediately known and no casualties were reported.
According to other witnesses, the army led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane carried out “air raids against the Rapid Support Forces” (FSR), the paramilitaries commanded by General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo, in the northwestern suburbs from Khartoum.
The war between the two generals has killed at least 2,800 people since April 15, according to the NGO Acled.
This assessment seems largely underestimated, the fighting preventing the identification of the bodies which litter the streets in Khartoum as in Darfur, a vast region in the west of the country, bordering Chad.
The violence has driven around 2.8 million people to flee their homes, 645,000 of whom have taken refuge in neighboring countries, according to the UN.
Experts warn that this war will be long because each side refuses to go to the negotiating table until it has won militarily.
In an attempt to make up for its human losses, the army, in difficulty in Khartoum but also on fronts opened up by rebels in the south of the country, called on “all young people and men who are capable of it” to enlist under the flags.
These calls worry pro-democracy activists and the international community. The UN has warned that the war has taken an “ethnic” turn in Darfur and considered that the violence committed in this region could constitute “crimes against humanity”.