War in Sudan: In Khartoum, epicenter of fighting, "the bodies rot in the dust of the streets"

Every day, Abderahman wakes up to the sound of aerial bombardment, which shakes the walls. “In the evening when we go to bed, a new ceasefire was announced on television. The next morning, you don’t need to open the window to know that the war is going on, “sighs on the phone this thirty-year-old member of a neighborhood committee east of Khartoum. Since April 15, the capital of Sudan has been the epicenter of fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by General Abdel Fattah Al-Bourhane, and the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), of General Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, known as “Hemetti”.

The multiple truces announced by the two belligerents have systematically been shattered. The human toll continues to worsen: more than 700 dead and 5,000 injured, according to a medical committee. “It’s vastly underrated. Bodies are piling up in morgues, rotting in the dust of the streets,” laments Rachid Badr, spokesperson for a doctors’ union. Among the victims, UNICEF reports more than 190 children.

For three weeks, the days have been a daily survival. In the Jareef al-Gharb neighborhood, where Abderahman lives, all the shops are closed. Only a small market remains, welcoming a few customers who do their shopping hastily in the middle of half-empty stalls. The rest of the days are spent, confined, dividing up the daily tasks: delivering medicine to an elderly couple, making phone calls to try to locate a missing young man in the middle of a war zone and, during a few moments of respite, playing on his telephone between two network cuts.

In the evening, some residents patrol the streets to protect their block from gangs, which have multiplied as several thousand detainees have been freed by fighters.

Mediation attempts

A little further south of the city, in the Al-Kalakla district, there has been no electricity for a week. High voltage pylons were damaged by artillery fire. “We are slowly dying,” said Hasan, a longtime anti-military activist who decided to stay to help his community. Around the few buildings equipped with electric generators, lines of neighbors wait in a maze of cables and extension cords to charge their phones in the street. While the price of canisters of drinking water has almost quadrupled, others will draw their water directly from the White Nile.

“The belligerents show contempt for civilian lives. They indiscriminately bomb densely populated urban areas,” researcher Mohamed Osman denounces in a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW). Most hospitals in Khartoum remain out of service and many facilities are occupied by soldiers. Hospital staff cars were replaced by armored vehicles topped with heavy weapons; emergency services are converted into military barracks.

Several mediation attempts are underway, led in particular by Saudi Arabia and the United States, to negotiate humanitarian access on the ground. Both sides have appointed envoys for a possible meeting in a third country. But the two commandments are clear: there will be no political discussion to end the conflict. “The two armies are camped on one and the same strategy: to win militarily”, recognizes on the telephone Volker Perthes, the special representative of the secretary general of the United Nations for Sudan, currently in Port Sudan.

On the ground, no army won a decisive victory despite the multiple reinforcements sent to the capital. More than 300,000 people have already been displaced by the fighting, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which estimates that this figure could quickly triple. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) counts more than 115,000 people who have fled to neighboring countries.

Logistic puzzle

A few tons of humanitarian aid are trickling into Port Sudan, by air or by cargo ship via the Red Sea, but the UN demands “security guarantees” in order to be able to deliver it to areas affected by the fighting . “These commitments are a precondition for large-scale humanitarian action,” OCHA chief Martin Griffiths said Wednesday, May 3, as six trucks carrying emergency aid to Darfur were looted.

Access to the western region of the country, where clashes between FAS and FSR are combined with the action of different militias fighting on both sides, represents a logistical headache for humanitarian workers. “We will have to go through Chad or South Sudan, which requires complex negotiations with neighboring countries and the Sudanese authorities. Beyond the administrative, it is the security aspect that is extremely worrying, with a spiral of violence that is spreading. It is dangerous for personnel and equipment, which must not fall into the wrong hands, ”explains Jean-Nicolas Dangelser, emergency coordinator for the NGO Médecins sans frontières (MSF).

Humanitarian programs in Sudan are sorely underfunded and international organizations have been taken aback. “We can say that we failed to prevent” the war in Sudan, which took the UN “by surprise”, Antonio Guterres, its secretary general, acknowledged on Wednesday. An admission of failure difficult to hear for many Sudanese, who denounce the blindness of the international community in the face of the growing rivalries between the two generals since their coup in October 2021.