The fierce combats between the two rival generals continue this Tuesday in Sudan, ignoring the last truce, at a time when the UN multiplies the warnings that the situation is headed for a “catastrophe” with hundreds of thousands of refugees.
Sudan has been mired in conflict since April 15 when a proxy war broke out between army chief General Abdel Fatah al Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (FAR), led by General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.
Violent clashes in Khartoum and other regions, especially in western Darfur, have left more than 500 dead and ten times as many injured, according to estimates that may be well below the actual number of victims. .
The conflict forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee the fighting to other areas within the territory or to neighboring countries.
UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, estimates that 100,000 people have fled Sudan to neighboring countries and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), another United Nations entity, estimates that there are 334,000 internally displaced persons.
In the capital, Khartoum, a city of five million inhabitants, the population suffers from lack of running water, electricity and food, with temperatures hovering around 40ºC.
“You can hear shots, war planes and anti-aircraft fire,” a resident of the south of the city told AFP. Other witnesses reported shelling in the north and east of Khartoum.
A senior UN official in Sudan, Abdou Dieng, warned Monday that the situation was heading for a “full-blown catastrophe.” Kenyan President William Ruto said the conflict had reached “catastrophic levels” and the feuding generals refused “to heed calls from the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the African Union and the international community to a ceasefire.”
In a virtual meeting with senior UN officials, Ruto said it was imperative to find ways to send humanitarian aid “with or without a ceasefire.”
Burhan and Daglo, now rivals, teamed up in a 2021 coup to sideline civilians from the government after the ouster of dictator Omar al-Bashir, halting the country’s transition.
Both sides have broken several truces, the latest a 72-hour ceasefire agreed late on Sunday.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) warned that the aid program for Sudan for 2023 is only 14% financed and that there is a lack of 1.5 billion dollars to face the humanitarian crisis, aggravated by the fighting .
UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths arrived in the Kenyan capital Nairobi on Monday on a mission to find ways to send aid to the millions of civilians trapped in Sudan.
“The situation that has been unfolding there (in Sudan) since April 15 is catastrophic,” he tweeted. The chaos of the conflict included the bombing of hospitals and looting of humanitarian facilities, forcing foreign organizations to suspend most of their operations.
The UNHCR fears that “more than 800,000 people” will flee the fighting to neighboring countries. The World Health Organization (WHO) warned that the fighting weighed down the country’s health system, which was already extremely fragile, pushing it towards a “catastrophe” and that in the capital only 16% of hospitals are operating at full capacity.
Chaos also engulfed the capital of West Darfur state, Geneina, where at least 96 people have been reported dead since fighting began, according to the UN.
“The health system is completely collapsed in Geneina,” said the doctors’ union, which denounced that the looting of their clinics and camps for the displaced forced various humanitarian agencies to carry out “emergency evacuations” of their staff.
The Darfur region is still heavily scarred by the war that began in 2003 when dictator Al Bashir recruited “Janjaweed” militias against ethnic minority rebels.
This war, which included a scorched earth campaign, left nearly 300,000 dead and nearly 2.5 million displaced, according to UN figures.
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