Intense fighting continues in Khartoum and Darfur, despite an agreement on a new truce in Sudan between the army and paramilitaries engaged in a war for power that has killed more than 500 people in nearly two weeks.
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The Medical Syndicate reported in an interim report in El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur state, that 74 people were killed during the first two days of fighting on Monday and Tuesday. To what extent “out of service” are all hospitals.
Across the country, “the health system is on the verge of total collapse” and “12,000 patients with kidney failure could die from a lack of dialysis,” the union warns.
The army of Major General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces of General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo agreed on Thursday night to extend the truce concluded under the auspices of the United States for a period of 72 hours. But which was not respected nearly.
“Violating the ceasefire does not mean it has failed,” foreign ministry spokesman Vedant Patel told reporters on Friday.
In Khartoum, air strikes and anti-aircraft fire took place near the army headquarters, witnesses told AFP.
“The situation in Darfur is still very tense,” a resident of El Geneina told AFP. “The markets have been looted and there is no more food.”
He added that many buildings and camps for the displaced have suffered “severe damage” and “there has been no power outage since Monday.”
mercenaries
Lawyers and doctors are sounding the alarm in this border region of Chad. In El Geneina, the fighters took out “machine guns, heavy machine guns and anti-aircraft fire machines” and “fired missiles at houses,” according to the Darfur Bar Association.
“Al-Burhan and Hemedti must immediately stop this stupid war being waged on the backs of civilians,” he urged.
The UN notes that “weapons are distributed” to civilians. His Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights warned that the conflict was fueling ethnic clashes anew in West Darfur, saying it was “concerned” by the “climate of generalized impunity”.
The United Nations warned that about 50,000 “severely malnourished” children would be deprived of food aid there, which suspended its activities after the death of five humanitarian workers.
Little information about this region, where the war broke out in 2003 between the ousted regime of Omar al-Bashir in 2019, and rebels from ethnic minorities, leaving about 300,000 dead and about 2.5 million displaced, according to the United Nations.
The belligerents continue to accuse each other of violating the armistice. Indeed, the army denounced the shooting of a Turkish military plane that came to evacuate citizens. Ankara confirmed that there were no casualties, according to the state-run Anadolu Agency.
Major General Burhan, on Al-Hurra TV, denounced the entry of “the mercenaries of Chad, the Central African Republic and Niger into the fighting.”
“This war is destroying Sudan,” General Daglo said in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), describing his opponent as a “traitor.”
“excesses”
On the diplomatic front, the two generals said they had exchanges with the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia or South Sudan. Juba is concerned about the “already apparent floods” of conflict, particularly with the influx of “refugees” into neighboring countries.
Tens of thousands of people have already crossed the border, mainly from Chad to the west and Egypt to the north. According to the United Nations, 270,000 people could flee to Chad and South Sudan.
It is expected that Major General Burhan’s representative will arrive in Cairo on Saturday to meet with the head of Egyptian diplomacy, Sameh Shoukry.
Hopes of a democratic transition dashed, the two generals together ousted civilians from power during a coup in 2021. Since then, they have been unable to agree on integrating the paramilitaries into the army before finally going to war on April 15.
In Khartoum, Khartoum’s five million residents are deprived of running water and electricity as well as internet and often telephone access. Gasoline and cash also began to run out.
Many Western countries, including the United States, France, Canada and the United Kingdom, continued to evacuate hundreds of people. China announced that it has evacuated most of its citizens.
Chad also continues to bring back its citizens caught up in the fighting: 130 of them, including children and the elderly, landed at night in N’Djamena from Port Sudan.
And a new Saudi ship arrived on Friday in Jeddah (west), bringing to 2991 the number of people evacuated by Riyadh, which received most of the foreigners who left Sudan by sea.
