Thousands of Khartoum residents fled on Wednesday, along roads lined with corpses and charred tanks, to escape the relentless fighting between paramilitaries and the regular army, which killed more than 270 civilians in five days in Sudan.
On foot or by car, civilians try to pass under the crossfire of the Rapid Support Forces (FSR), the paramilitaries of General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo, known as Hemedti, and the army led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane, de facto leader of Sudan since the coup led by the two men in 2021.
“Life is impossible in Khartoum,” Alawya al-Tayeb, 33, told AFP on his way south. “I did everything so that my children did not see the corpses” because they are “already traumatized”.
“We go to relatives in Wad Madani”, the capital of al-Jazeera, 200 kilometers to the south, explains Mohammed Saleh, a 43-year-old civil servant. Now that soldiers and paramilitaries are prowling the streets, “we are afraid that our houses will be attacked”.
The fighting that broke out on Saturday mainly ravages Khartoum and Darfur (west) but the very first frictions began Thursday near the air base of Meroe, in the neighboring north of Egypt.
There, while soldiers and paramilitaries had been massing for days, in the chaos of the fighting, 177 Egyptian soldiers present for training were captured by the RSF.
Since then, Egypt — a great ally of General Burhane — said it was working on their return. They took off on Wednesday evening aboard “four Egyptian military planes from Dongola airport”, 400 km north of Khartoum, the Sudanese army announced, without Cairo confirming their departure or arrival.
If this point of tension which raised fears of a regional explosion seems resolved, the two rival generals remain deaf to calls for a ceasefire.
The FSR and the army announced on Wednesday “a 24-hour truce” from 4:00 p.m. GMT but, like the previous break announced the day before, it never started.
On Thursday, the bosses of the UN, the African Union, the Arab League and other regional organizations are due to meet to demand a new ceasefire.
In the capital of more than five million inhabitants deprived of electricity and running water, stray bullets regularly pierce walls and windows. Sometimes a bomb reduces a building or a hospital to a pile of rubble.
More than 270 civilians have been killed since Saturday, according to a provisional report from Western embassies.
They urged both sides to “not illegally evict residents, spare civilian infrastructure, let through basic foodstuffs and emergency aid to the wounded and sick.”
On Wednesday, the army said it fought with the FSRs around a Central Bank branch and claimed that “astronomical sums were stolen”.
Air force and artillery from both sides shelled nine hospitals in Khartoum. In all, 39 of the 59 hospitals in the areas affected by the fighting have been disabled or forced to close, according to doctors.
As for food stocks, already limited in a country with triple-digit inflation, they are running out and no supply trucks enter the capital.
Humanitarians and diplomats say they can no longer work in Sudan, a country of 45 million people, more than a third of whom suffer from hunger. Three employees of the World Food Program (WFP) were killed in Darfur and the UN denounced “looting, attacks and sexual violence against humanitarian workers”.
To flee the violence, thousands of women and children took to the road on Wednesday to the provinces bordering Khartoum.
Around them, according to witnesses, corpses lie under a blazing sun. As pestilential odors begin to emerge from them, a few people venture to cover them with a sheet. A man explains that he wants to prevent stray dogs from approaching it.
Sometimes a convoy of fighters perched on pick-ups passes or others, posted on the side of the road, check the vehicles.
At the end of the road, a few dozen kilometers from the capital, life goes on as if nothing had happened with shops open and transport operating normally.
In Khartoum, on the other hand, the attacks spared no one: the Belgian boss of the EU humanitarian mission was “hospitalized” after being shot and the European ambassador attacked at his home.
After five days of fighting, the confusion is total and online misinformation gallops.
However, satellite images show the extent of the damage, visible in particular at the headquarters of the general staff.
A dozen planes are lying in ashes on the tarmac of the airport, the headquarters of general information appears devastated, what was a depot for petrol tankers is now just a huge black stain.
In Darfur, in the west of the country, 320 Sudanese soldiers crossed the border, officially closed since Saturday, towards Chad to go because they were “afraid of being killed by the RSF”, according to the Chadian Minister of defense.
“Neither side seems to be winning at the moment and given the intensity of the fighting (…), things could get even worse before the two generals sit down at the negotiating table”, warns Clément Deshayes, teacher at the University of Paris 1.
For this, “their regional partners would have to exert pressure and for the moment the declarations do not go in this direction”, affirms to AFP this specialist in Sudan.
20/04/2023 01:09:52 – Khartoum (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
