Fighting raged on in Sudan on Monday night, but Saudi and American mediators have welcomed the five-day extension of an unfulfilled ceasefire meant to allow the delivery of vital humanitarian aid to the country on the brink of famine.
Khartoum residents told AFP fighting in the northern suburbs and artillery fire in the south of the capital of more than five million people.
As usual, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane’s army and General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitaries blamed each other for the attack and made sure they only responded to attacks. The FSR therefore accused the army of carrying out a deadly airstrike in Khartoum on Monday.
For their part, Washington and Riyadh are noticing “new ceasefire violations” every day, but without ever activating the “sanctions” or “monitoring mechanism” they allegedly put in place when the first ceasefire was announced.
Beginning on May 22, families have been able to rush out to buy something to eat or drink for twice what it was before the war.
But thousands of others continue to hide in their homes, many without running water or electricity, for fear of stray bullets.
Aid workers have only been able to deliver small amounts of food or medicine because their workers are unable to travel due to the fighting and their shipments arriving by plane are still blocked at customs, they say.
According to Toby Harvard of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the situation is even worse in Darfur, a vast western region bordering Chad that was devastated by war back in the 2000s.
Newborns died in the hospital
“Sporadic fighting between soldiers and paramilitaries in recent days in El-Fasher, North Darfur and even in the Abou Chouk IDP camp has resulted in civilian casualties,” he said.
The fighting left homes looted and again displaced tens of thousands of people in “a flagrant violation of the ceasefire and preventing the distribution of humanitarian aid,” he added.
In east Darfur, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), “about thirty newborns have died in a hospital since the fighting began, six of them in the same week due to lack of oxygen during the power outages.”
According to the NGO ACLED, more than 1,800 people have been killed since the war began on April 15. According to the United Nations, more than a million others have been forced to relocate elsewhere in Sudan and nearly 350,000 abroad.
Neighboring countries fear contagion and are demanding help from the United Nations, which in return claims to have received only a tiny part of the funds from its donors.
On Monday, the United Nations warned that the war has added Sudan to the list of ten countries at risk of famine.
In a few days the rainy season will begin and with it a series of epidemics, from malaria to cholera.
civil war
According to the doctors’ union, the country will grapple with three-quarters of hospitals in the battle zones being out of order and others in the spared areas where the displaced are piling up.
When the belligerents have agreed to an extension of the ceasefire, signals on the ground are not aimed at appeasement.
After the army recalled its pensioners, tribes in the east of the country who were demanding arms, the governor of Darfur, a former rebel and now an army ally, called on civilians to take up arms.
The Umma party, the oldest in the country toppled from power in the 2021 coup by the two warring generals, denounced an “attempt to drag the country into civil war”.
Yasser Arman, a leader of the pro-civilian power bloc, the Forces of Freedom and Change (FLC), accused supporters of Omar al-Bashir’s ousted dictatorship of wanting to “exacerbate ethnic divides” to throw the country into chaos to overthrow, and so on. The people are demanding their return.
The FLC also warned of calls for “all-out civil war” and urged both sides to follow the African Union (AU) exit plan.
The latter on Saturday reiterated his willingness to implement a roadmap for Sudan, and Europeans backed him. Washington has said it supports this initiative, but with every uprising in Sudan, Americans and Saudis conduct a diplomatic process in parallel with regional efforts.
Armistice or not, a new danger remains: more and more unexploded projectiles are littering the streets and even buildings, the United Nations has warned.