Explosions and gunfire rocked Khartoum Thursday, April 20, the sixth day of deadly fighting between the Sudanese army and paramilitaries, led by two rival generals. Despite calls for a truce for the end of Ramadan on Friday, these fights are relentless.
Reacting for the first time since the start of hostilities, army chief General Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman Al-Bourhane said there would be no “political discussions” with his rival, Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, says “Hemetti”, at the head of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF): either he stops “wanting to control the country”, or he will be “crushed militarily”.
After a virtual meeting with the African Union, the Arab League and other regional organizations, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for a ceasefire of “at least three days” for the Eid-ul-Fitr, the Muslim holiday that marks the end of the Ramadan fast on Friday.
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.
“We would like the fighting to stop for Eid, but we know that will not happen”
Tagrid Abdine, a 49-year-old architect in Khartoum, is “not optimistic”. “It’s been three or four times that a ceasefire has been announced, but the two sides have never respected it,” she testified to Agence France-Presse (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 neighborhoods in the center, the smell of death and corpses reigns”, testifies another man on his way to a quieter area. In the metropolis of more than 5 million inhabitants, many families have run out of food and no longer have electricity or running water. Some crowd the roads to escape air raids and street fighting.
To seek shelter, the displaced had to undergo questions or searches from the men posted at the RSF checkpoints, guided by General Daglo, and the army, led by General Al-Bourhane, the de facto chief of Sudan since the putsch they carried out 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, locatable with the columns of black smoke which escape from it.
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). The latter says he is working “in close collaboration with the Chadian government and its partners to assess their needs and prepare a common response”.
Already more than 400,000 Sudanese refugees
“Every day people are pouring in and a humanitarian corridor has been opened,” said Chadian communications minister and government spokesman Aziz Mahamat Saleh. Eastern Chad already hosts more than 400,000 Sudanese refugees, and “the new arrivals are putting additional strain on the country’s already overstretched public services and resources,” he said.
The most urgent needs are water, food, shelter, health care, child protection and the prevention of gender-based violence. Due to the violence experienced by people crossing the border, psychosocial support is also a priority.
Both sides are raining announcements of victory and mutual accusations, impossible to verify on the ground as the danger is permanent. The air force, which targets RSF bases and positions scattered in residential areas, does not hesitate to drop bombs, sometimes over hospitals, doctors testified.
US soldiers deployed
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, the structures no longer have any stock to operate, or combatants have took control, driving out medics and wounded. In the capital, “children are hiding in schools and daycare centers amid fighting, and children’s hospitals have been forced to evacuate in the face of airstrikes,” UNICEF added. Humanitarians have mostly been forced to suspend their crucial aid in the country, where more than one in three inhabitants suffers from hunger in normal times.
Amid the general chaos, Egypt managed, through mediation by the United Arab Emirates, to evacuate “177 of its soldiers” stationed at a northern air base, 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.
Thursday, the United States announced Thursday to dispatch soldiers to facilitate a possible evacuation of the personnel of their embassy. “We are sending additional forces to the region to secure and facilitate the eventual departure of U.S. embassy personnel from Sudan, should circumstances dictate,” the Pentagon said in a statement, which did not specify the date. number of soldiers sent.