The UN calls on Thursday to grant “three days” of respite to the Sudanese still caught in the crossfire of the army and the paramilitaries of the two generals in war for power on the occasion of the end of Ramadan celebration on Friday.
But calls for dialogue or even a short truce have found no response for six days, stifled by the din of air raids, explosions and street fighting.
Thursday, reacting for the first time since the beginning of hostilities, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane, head of the army, decided: there will be no “political discussions” with his rival Mohamed Hamdane Daglo, says ” Hemedti”, at the head of the Rapid Support Forces (FSR): either he stops “wanting to control the country”, or he will be “crushed militarily”.
After a meeting with the African Union, the Arab League and other regional organizations, UN chief Antonio Guterres called for a ceasefire of “at least three days” for Eid al- Fitr, the feast that marks the end of the Muslim fast of Ramadan on Friday.
He also spoke on the phone with General Burhane, also contacted by the presidents of South Sudan and Turkey, the prime minister of neighboring Ethiopia, as well as the heads of diplomacy from the United States, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the Sudanese army reported. .
Since April 15, clashes, mainly in the capital and the Darfur region (west), have left “more than 330 dead and 3,200 injured”, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Explosions also sounded Thursday in El-Obeid, 350 kilometers south of the capital.
But Tagrid Abdine, a 49-year-old architect in Khartoum, is “not optimistic”. “It’s been three or four times that we announced a ceasefire but the two sides have never respected it,” she told AFP.
“We would like the fighting to stop for Eid, but we know that will not happen,” laments Abdallah, another resident of the capital.
In “certain districts of the center, the smell of death and corpses reigns”, testifies a man on his way to a quieter district.
In the metropolis of more than five million inhabitants, many families have exhausted their last food and no longer have electricity or running water. Some crowd the roads to escape air raids and street fighting.
“At 4:30 a.m., we were woken up by the air raids. We closed all the doors and windows because we were afraid of a stray bullet,” another Khartoum resident, Nazek, told AFP. Abdallah, 38 years old.
A few tens of kilometers away, life goes on and houses open to accommodate the displaced. Traumatized, they drove or walked for hours.
To take shelter, they had to undergo the questions or the searches of the men posted at the checkpoints of the FSR of General Daglo and the army of General Burhane, de facto leader of Sudan since the putsch that they have conducted together in 2021.
Above all, they had to progress in the middle of the corpses which litter the edges of the road and avoid the most dangerous zones, identifiable by the columns of black smoke which escape from them.
Since the power struggle, latent for weeks between the two generals, turned into a pitched battle, civilians have also fled in large numbers abroad.
Between 10,000 and 20,000 people, mostly women and children, have crossed into neighboring Chad, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
On both sides, announcements of victory and mutual accusations rain down, impossible to verify on the ground as the danger is permanent.
The air force, which targets the bases and positions of the FSR scattered in residential areas, does not hesitate to drop bombs, sometimes above hospitals, doctors testified.
In five days, “70% of the 74 hospitals in Khartoum and areas affected by the fighting have been put out of use”, according to their union: bombed, they no longer have any stock to operate or fighters have taken it control, chasing doctors and wounded.
In the capital, “children are hidden in schools and nurseries in the midst of fighting and children’s hospitals have been forced to evacuate in the face of airstrikes”, adds UNICEF.
Humanitarians have mostly been forced to suspend their aid, crucial in a country where more than one in three inhabitants suffer from hunger in normal times.
Three employees of the World Food Program (WFP) were notably killed in Darfur at the start of the fighting.
Amid the general chaos, Egypt managed, through mediation by the United Arab Emirates, to evacuate “177 of its soldiers” stationed at an air base in the North, according to the two countries.
And 27 others, captured by the paramilitaries and then handed over to the Red Cross, are at the embassy in Khartoum, according to the Egyptian army.
On Thursday, the United States announced that it would send soldiers to the Sudan region to facilitate a possible evacuation of its embassy.
04/20/2023 23:08:29 – Khartoum (AFP) – © 2023 AFP