The deadly fighting between paramilitaries and the army entered its thirteenth day on Thursday in Sudan, where the capital Khartoum and the Darfur region are now in the grip of bomb chaos despite a ceasefire.
Military planes fly over the northern suburbs of Khartoum where troops of the two warring generals exchange machine gun and heavy weapon fire, witnesses tell AFP, despite the 72-hour truce concluded under the aegis of the United States and Saudi Arabia, which began on Tuesday.
The violence left at least eight dead on Wednesday alone, according to the doctors’ union.
Numerous attempts to silence the guns have failed since the start of the conflict on April 15 between General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane’s army and the much-feared paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo, says “Hemedti”.
On Wednesday evening, the army announced that it had agreed to send a representative to Juba, the capital of neighboring South Sudan, for talks with the RSF “at the initiative of IGAD”, a regional bloc in South Africa. ‘East.
General Burhane said he agreed to discuss an extension of the 72-hour truce which is due to end Thursday at midnight and was generally poorly respected.
The paramilitaries did not comment on this regional initiative.
According to the Sudanese Ministry of Health, at least 512 people have been killed and 4,193 injured since the start of the conflict, but the toll is likely much higher.
The situation in Khartoum is “extremely bad”, Chaaban, a Syrian national who is awaiting his evacuation from Port Sudan, told AFP: “We just want to go safely to Jeddah (in Saudi Arabia) or Syria. We just want to leave Sudan”.
“Your war, not ours”
Beyond the capital, the violence has torn apart other regions since the start, notably West Darfur.
Looting, murders and burning of houses took place in El-Geneina, capital of this border region of Chad and theater in the 2000s of a particularly bloody war, according to the UN.
Some 50,000 children “suffering from acute malnutrition” are deprived of food aid there, alert the United Nations, which had to interrupt their activities after the death of five humanitarian workers.
The fighting has caused a mass exodus in this country of 45 million inhabitants, one of the poorest in the world.
On the way to the border with neighboring Egypt, Achraf, a Sudanese fleeing Khartoum, called on the two generals to “stop the war”. “It’s your war, not that of the Sudanese people,” said the 50-year-old man, met by AFP in the desert.
Those who remain in Sudan have to contend with food, water and electricity shortages as well as internet and phone line cuts.
Several tens of thousands of people have already arrived in border countries, notably Egypt in the north and Ethiopia in the east, according to the UN. And, in total, 270,000 people could flee to Chad and South Sudan.
“Leave Now”
In recent days, several countries have organized evacuations. On Wednesday, the French navy still transported nearly 400 people of different nationalities while China dispatched ships to evacuate its nationals.
London, for its part, called on its citizens to “leave now”, before the end of the ceasefire, relatively respected in the evacuation corridors.
So far, 14 hospitals have been bombed, according to the doctors’ union, and 19 others have been forcibly evacuated because of gunfire, lack of equipment and personnel or because fighters had taken up residence there.
In the general chaos, hundreds of detainees escaped from three prisons, in particular the high security establishment of Kober, which hosted the inner circle of the former dictator Omar al-Bashir, wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC ) for “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” in Darfur.
Detained in a military hospital because of his state of health, according to the army, the 79-year-old ex-president Bashir was sacked by the army in April 2019 under the pressure of a major popular uprising.
Doubling the hopes of a democratic transition, the two generals had together ousted civilians from power in 2021, before going to war, failing to agree on the integration of paramilitaries into the army.