Despite the 72-hour truce concluded on Tuesday under the aegis of the United States and Saudi Arabia, the deadly clashes between the army and paramilitaries entered their thirteenth day on Thursday April 27. This new attempt to silence the guns has again failed.
General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane’s army and the much feared paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo, known as “Hemedti” continue to exchange machine gun and heavy weapon fire. Khartoum, the capital, and the Dafur region are still in the grip of the chaos of the bombs.
And civilians continue to pay a heavy price. According to the doctors’ union, eight people died on Wednesday alone. According to the Sudanese Ministry of Health, at least 512 people have been killed and 4,193 injured since the start of the conflict, but the toll is likely much higher.
The situation in Khartoum is “extremely bad,” said Chaaban, a Syrian national awaiting evacuation from Port Sudan: “We just want to go safely to Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) or Syria. We just want to leave Sudan.”
On Wednesday evening, the army announced that it had agreed to send a representative to Juba, the capital of neighboring South Sudan, for talks with the RSF “at the initiative of IGAD” (the Intergovernmental Authority on Development ), East African regional bloc. General Burhane said he agreed to discuss an extension of the 72-hour truce which is due to end Thursday at midnight and has generally been poorly respected. The paramilitaries did not comment on this regional initiative.
West Darfur is also hard hit by the violence. Looting, murders and burning of houses took place in El-Geneina, capital of this border region of Chad and theater in the 2000s of a particularly bloody war, according to the UN.
Some 50,000 children “suffering from acute malnutrition” are deprived of food aid there, alert the United Nations, which had to interrupt their activities after the death of five humanitarian workers.
The fighting has caused a mass exodus in this country of 45 million inhabitants, one of the poorest in the world. On their way to the border with neighboring Egypt, Ashraf, a Sudanese fleeing Khartoum, called on the two generals to “stop the war”. “It’s your war, not the Sudanese people’s,” said the 50-year-old man he met in the desert.
Those who remain in Sudan have to contend with food, water and electricity shortages as well as internet and phone line cuts. Several tens of thousands of people have already arrived in border countries, notably Egypt in the north and Ethiopia in the east, according to the UN. And, in total, 270,000 people could flee to Chad and South Sudan.
So far, 14 hospitals have been bombed, according to the doctors’ union, and 19 others have been forcibly evacuated because of gunfire, lack of equipment and personnel or because fighters had taken up residence there.
The international community has started the evacuations in recent days. On Wednesday, the French navy still transported nearly 400 people of different nationalities while China dispatched ships to evacuate its nationals. London, for its part, called on its citizens to “leave now”, before the end of the ceasefire, relatively respected in the evacuation corridors.
