(Khartoum) Fighting rages on Tuesday in Khartoum between soldiers and paramilitaries, who are vying for power, on the eve of Eid al-Adha, a Muslim holiday on the occasion of which the paramilitaries have announced the release of “100 prisoners of war “.
In the capital, the fighting between the army, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo is now concentrated around military bases.
The FSR are, since the beginning of the war on April 15, present en masse in the residential areas where they had established their bases for a long time. The army tries to use its main asset: the air, which it alone controls, without its infantry managing to gain a foothold in the huge city crossed by two arms of the Nile.
For several days, the FSR have been trying to bring down the capital where millions of inhabitants are still hiding – nearly a million and a half of them have left, fleeing stray bullets and water and electricity cuts. under scorching heat.
They took over police headquarters, its huge arsenal and training camps in southern Khartoum and on Tuesday harassed the army at its bases in central, northern and southern Khartoum, residents report.
Under fire, Mawaheb Omar, holed up in her home with her four children, recounts an Eid celebration that promises to be “miserable and tasteless: you can’t even buy mutton”.
If the bases where the fighting takes place are taken, say the experts, the RSF will have taken control of the city.
Looting
But the inhabitants, they denounce en bloc these former militiamen trained to fight in the bloody war in Darfur launched in 2003, accused today of looting humanitarian stocks, factories and even houses abandoned by inhabitants who fled the violence – or taken from strength.
General Daglo responded to these accusations on Tuesday in an audio recording posted online.
“The FSR will take swift and strict action” against those in their ranks who have carried out such abuses, he said, as the paramilitaries announced Monday evening to start trying some of their “undisciplined” members.
They also announced the release of “100 prisoners of war, members of the army”. Since the beginning of the conflict, the two camps have regularly announced exchanges of prisoners via the Red Cross without ever specifying their number.
General Daglo, originally from Darfur and whose troops are accused of having committed atrocities in this western region in the 2000s, also spoke of the fate of this gold-rich area where more than one Sudanese lives on four.
We must “avoid plunging into civil war”, he said, while the UN denounces fighting “with an ethnic dimension” and abuses which could constitute “crimes against humanity”, in particular rape , attributed by most survivors to FSRs.
New fronts
In difficulty in Khartoum, the army must also face new fronts: a rebel group is now attacking it in the regions of Kordofan, Blue Nile and south of Khartoum.
In South Kordofan, local authorities have declared a night curfew in an attempt to stem the violence.
The UN mission in Sudan, which withdrew almost all of its staff from the country at the start of the war, said it was “very concerned” about the violence in Kurmuk, a Blue Nile town bordering Ethiopia .
The fighting has caused “hundreds of civilians to Ethiopia to flee there”, she reports, recalling that in the summer of 2021 tribal clashes had already killed more than 200 people in the Blue Nile.
In all, more than two million people have been forced to move inside Sudan since April 15, while another 600,000 have fled the country, mainly to Egypt in the north and Chad in the west. .
The UN and humanitarians say they lack funds and warn: the rainy season, from June to September, greatly jeopardizes their ability to act while 25 million people need humanitarian aid to survive.
And with the rains come every year in Sudan epidemics of malaria, cholera and dengue fever.