As the 72-hour ceasefire remains fragile, a boat carrying 1,687 civilians fleeing fighting in Sudan arrived in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday (April 26th), the foreign ministry said, when 245 people landed in Paris.
Some 245 recently evacuated French and foreign nationals landed at Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle airport on Wednesday morning in a plane chartered by the French authorities. Coming from Djibouti, it landed on the tarmac around 7:30 a.m. Among the passengers, welcomed by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Catherine Colonna, were 195 French people, but also Dutch, Italians, New Zealanders and Sudanese, learned Agence France-Presse (AFP) from the Quai d’Orsay.
The port city of Jeddah hosted 13 Saudi civilians and 1,674 citizens from countries in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Asia, North America and Central America, according to the press release from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A total of 2,148 people have been evacuated from Sudan to Saudi Arabia so far, including more than 2,000 foreigners, the statement said. All of the evacuees were “transported by one of the kingdom’s ships, and the kingdom was keen to meet all the essential needs of foreign nationals,” the Saudi ministry said in its statement.
Continued clashes
A three-day US-brokered ceasefire between the warring sides has brought some calm to Khartoum, but witnesses have reported airstrikes and fighting. Clashes around “strategic places” have “largely continued and sometimes even intensified”, the head of the United Nations (UN) mission in Sudan, Volker Perthes, noted Tuesday evening before the Security Council from Port Sudan. (East), where the UN has relocated some of its staff. Mr. Perthes claimed that “there is no clear sign yet that either [the two generals] are ready to really negotiate”.
The army had targeted Tuesday with its planes the positions of the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which responded with bursts of heavy machine guns, in the suburbs of Khartoum, reported witnesses to AFP. New air raids targeting RSF vehicles took place in the evening in the north of the capital, according to other witnesses.
And General Mohammed Hamdan Daglo’s paramilitaries – who oppose the army of rival General Abdel Fattah Al-Bourhane, in power since a coup in October 2021 – said they had taken control of a refinery and a power plant 70 km north of Khartoum, video showed on Tuesday. The army reported on Facebook a “significant movement [of the FSR] towards the refinery with the aim of taking advantage of the truce to take control [of it]. As with every truce announcement, the FSR and the army mutually accused each other of violating it.
Violence erupted in Khartoum on April 15 between the army of General Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman Al-Bourhane, Sudan’s de facto ruler since the 2021 putsch, and his deputy turned rival, General Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, known as “Hemetti”, who commands the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). According to the UN, more than 459 people were killed and more than 4,000 injured
