(Khartoum) The deadly fighting between paramilitaries and the army entered its thirteenth day on Thursday in Sudan, where the capital Khartoum and the Darfur region are now in the grip of chaos from bombs despite a ceasefire.
Military planes fly over the northern suburbs of Khartoum where the troops of the two warring generals exchange machine gun and heavy weapon fire, witnesses tell AFP, despite the 72-hour truce concluded under the aegis of the United States and Saudi Arabia, which began on Tuesday.
Numerous attempts to silence the guns have failed since the start of the conflict on April 15 between General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane’s army and the much-feared paramilitaries of General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), says “ Hemedti ”.
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 ”, a regional bloc in South Africa. ‘East.
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.
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.
Beyond the capital, the violence has also torn other regions of Sudan from the start, notably West Darfur.
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 very bloody war, according to the UN.
The United Nations, which had to interrupt its activities after the death of five humanitarian workers, warns that it can no longer help “50,000 children suffering from acute malnutrition” there.
The fighting caused a mass exodus and plunged a little more distress into the country of 45 million inhabitants, already one of the poorest in the world.
On the way to the border with neighboring Egypt, Achraf, a Sudanese who fled Khartoum, calls on the two rival generals to “stop the war”.
“The Sudanese are suffering and don’t deserve this. It’s your war, not that of the Sudanese people,” said this 50-year-old man, met by AFP in the middle of the northern desert.
For those left in Sudan, there are shortages of food, water and electricity. Telephone and internet lines are regularly inaccessible.
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, which fears a mass exodus.
A total of 270,000 people could flee to Chad and South Sudan, estimates the international organization.
In recent days, governments of foreign countries have organized convoys by road, air and sea to evacuate their nationals.
So far, 14 hospitals have been bombed, according to the doctors’ union, and 19 others have been forcibly evacuated because they were under fire, had no equipment or staff left or because fighters had taken up residence there. .
In the general chaos, hundreds of detainees escaped from three prisons, in particular the high-security establishment of Kober, which housed the inner circle of former dictator Omar al-Bashir, including a senior official wanted by the Court International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity.
Detained in a military hospital because of his state of health, according to the army, Bashir, 79, was sacked by the army in April 2019 under pressure from the streets.
Damping hopes of a democratic transition, the two generals now at war had ousted civilians from power together in 2021, before going to war because they could not agree on the integration of paramilitaries In the Army.