Clashes between the Sudanese army and paramilitaries resumed on Sunday (April 30) in Khartoum, as a three-day truce, which has never been respected, is about to expire at midnight on Sunday. Millions of Sudanese have been trapped in bombing and anti-aircraft fire since the outbreak on April 15 of a war between the army of General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhane and his number two, General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo, who commands the Forces rapid support (FSR), feared paramilitaries.
The war has left 528 dead and 4,599 injured according to vastly understated official figures, and both sides accuse each other of violating the truce. On Sunday, witnesses reported fighting near army headquarters in Khartoum and airstrikes in Omdurman, a northern suburb of the capital. “There is very heavy fighting, gunshots ring out in my street every few minutes since dawn,” a witness told Agence France-Presse.
As the fighting enters its third week, the capital’s 5 million people, when not fleeing, remain barricaded, trying to survive shortages of food, water and electricity. Tens of thousands of people have been displaced inside Sudan or have made arduous journeys to neighboring countries, Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia and South Sudan. Foreign governments have evacuated their nationals and citizens of other nationalities, especially from Port Sudan to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on the other side of the Red Sea. According to the UN, 75,000 people are internally displaced and at least 20,000 have fled to Chad, 4,000 to South Sudan, 3,500 to Ethiopia and 3,000 to the Central African Republic.
Despite calls from the international community, no diplomatic solution is in sight between the two rivals who continue to rail against each other through the media. “The UN is stepping up its efforts to help people seeking safety in neighboring countries”, assures its Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Twitter, who says he supports any African mediation. The UN chief warned of a “terrible” situation in Darfur, where “society is collapsing” with “tribes now trying to arm themselves”.
“Gun violence between tribes” in Darfur
Sudanese authorities say the fighting is affecting 12 of the 18 states that make up this country of 45 million people, one of the poorest in the world. According to the UN, a hundred people have been killed since Monday in El-Geneina, capital of West Darfur, a region still marked by the bloody civil war of the 2000s. “Armed violence between tribes” caused the destruction of the city’s main hospital, says the Ministry of Health. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) announced that it had to “stop almost all of (its) activities” because of the violence.
At the head of the Janjawid militiamen, General Daglo, known as “Hemetti”, had carried out the scorched earth policy in Darfur, on the orders of Omar Al-Bashir, the former dictator overthrown in 2019 by the street. The war that started in 2003 killed around 300,000 people and displaced nearly 2.5 million, according to the UN. Since then, the Janjawid have evolved and officially gave birth in 2013 to the FSR, a paramilitary auxiliary to the army.
Today rivals, Generals Burhane and Daglo had nevertheless joined forces during the putsch of 2021 to oust the civilians with whom they shared power since the fall of Omar Al-Bashir. But differences then appeared and, for lack of agreement on the integration of the FSR into the army, degenerated into open war.
