Thousands of people fled in the last hours of Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, where according to witnesses bodies were lying in the streets, on the sixth day of fighting between the army and paramilitaries that has left more than 270 dead.
Clashes in Khartoum and other parts of the nation have left more than 270 civilians dead, according to a “provisional” balance from fifteen Western embassies.
Foreign governments began planning the evacuation of thousands of expatriates, including UN officials. Foreign diplomats have been attacked and the United Nations denounced “looting, attacks and sexual violence against aid workers.”
The Defense Minister of Chad, the neighboring country, reported that 320 Sudanese soldiers even crossed the border on Sunday to flee the fierce clashes. There are 320 elements of the Sudanese army, gendarmes, police and military, who fear being killed by the Rapid Support Forces who surrendered to our forces,” General Daoud Yaya Brahim told AFP. The fighting broke out on Saturday between the forces of two Generals who seized power in a 2021 coup: Army chief Abdel Fatah al Burhan and his then number two Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, commander of the Rapid Support Forces (SFR) paramilitary group
The two militaries oppose plans to integrate the SFR into the regular army, a key condition of the final agreement to resume the democratic transition in the country.
Khartoum is a flight scene. By car or on foot, thousands of people left the city amid a strong smell of decomposition, testimonies said. “Life in Khartoum is impossible if this war is not stopped,” Alawya al-Tayeb, 33, said as she fled the capital. “I did everything possible so that my children did not see the corpses in the streets,” she added.
Loud explosions and intense gunfire were heard in Khartoum and witnesses said thick columns of black smoke billowed from buildings around the army headquarters, located in the center of the capital.
FAR fighters toured the capital in vehicles with heavy weapons, while army fighter planes flew overhead and fired at paramilitaries, witnesses said.
Civilians who remain at home are increasingly desperate in the face of food shortages, blackouts and a lack of clean water. Some of them have been forced to leave in search of food and supplies as the fighting subsides. Their hope of being evacuated was dashed on Tuesday when a 24-hour humanitarian truce was called off just minutes after the start time. . The SFR unilaterally announced “a 24-hour truce from 1600 GMT” on Wednesday, but there is little hope that it will come to pass.
After six days of fighting, it remains impossible to know who controls which parts of the capital. Satellite images, however, show the extent of the damage, visible from the headquarters of the army’s General Staff. before the two generals sit down at the negotiating table,” warns Clément Deshayes of the Paris 1 University
This spiral of violence takes place after more than 120 civilians died in the repression against pro-democracy demonstrations in the last 18 months.
The outbreak of violence on Saturday was the culmination of deep divisions between the army and the SFR, created in 2013 by the ousted autocratic leader Omar al Bashir. The fighting took 177 Egyptian soldiers taking part in joint training in the north of the country by surprise and they were captured by the SFR. This event threatened to provoke a regional escalation of the conflict, but finally they were evacuated “on board four Egyptian military planes”, said the Sudanese army.
Burhan and Dagalo together toppled Bashir in April 2019 after massive protests against his three decades of rule. In October 2021, the two men led a coup against the civilian government installed after Bashir’s departure, ending a transition supported by the international community. Burhan, a career military officer from northern Sudan, has said the coup was “necessary” to bring other factions into politics. But for Dagalo, known as “Hemedti”, the coup was a “mistake” that failed to bring about change and rather strengthened those who remained from the Bashir regime.b
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
