Hundreds of civilians were killed in Sudan on the third day of fighting between the army led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane and the powerful paramilitary force of General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo, as gunfire and explosions shook Khartoum non-stop.
In the capital Khartoum, shrouded in the smell of gunpowder, some without water or electricity, residents are barricaded in their homes while thick black smoke billows from the city center where the political and military institutions sit.
The few grocery stores that are opening have warned they will only last days due to a shortage of supplies, and the hospitals taking in the wounded are short of blood and equipment.
Following the Arab League and the African Union, the United States and the United Kingdom on Monday called for an “immediate cessation” of violence.
“There is a strong shared concern about the fighting…the threat it poses to civilians, to the Sudanese nation and possibly even to the region,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said after an interview with his British counterpart James Cleverly in Japan.
- Listen to the spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Africa to learn more about the situation in Sudan QUB radio:
For weeks, conflict simmered between the two generals who worked together to oust civilians from power during the October 2021 coup before turning guns on each other on Saturday morning.
Since then, the fight with heavy weapons has not stopped and the Air Force has regularly targeted the headquarters of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), including in the heart of Khartoum.
These former militiamen from the war in the Darfur region-turned-army official auxiliaries-are deployed to the capital, in uniform and armed, to take control of the country’s infrastructure.
At least 97 civilians were killed, including 56 on Saturday and 41 on Sunday, about half in Khartoum, according to the official doctors’ union, and the number of militants killed is counted in “ten”.
The army assured on Sunday evening that the situation was “extremely stable”, while the FSR said they were “on the way to final victory”.
hospitals in need
In fact, on Monday it is impossible to know which force controls what. The FSR announced that they had taken the airport and entered the presidential palace, to which the army denied.
In particular, the army claims to hold its staff headquarters, one of the main power complexes in Khartoum.
As for state television, the two parties also claim to have taken it over. But residents of the area report ongoing fighting during the broadcast, only patriotic songs are broadcast, like during the coup.
While there is no sign of a ceasefire, doctors and humanists are sounding the alarm: Even in normal times, households in Sudan are only supplied with electricity for a few hours a day. In some districts of Khartoum it has been completely shut off since Saturday, like running water.
Doctors have announced power outages in operating rooms and, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), “several of the nine hospitals in Khartoum receiving wounded civilians are without blood, transfusions, intravenous fluids and other vital supplies”.
The patients, sometimes children, and their loved ones “have run out of food and drink,” affirmed a network of pro-democracy doctors, saying they could no longer safely let the patients treated go, which “has created a bottleneck that keeps us from doing it.” prevents to take care of all”.
The three-hour “humanitarian corridors” announced by the two warring factions on Sunday afternoon did not change the situation: all this time explosions and shootings in Khartoum did not stop.
“First time in Khartoum”
While more than a third of Sudan’s 45 million people were in need of humanitarian assistance before the recent outbreak of violence, the World Food Program (WFP) halted its aid on Sunday after the death of three of its staff in Darfur (west).
“It is the first time in the history of Sudan since independence (1956) that there is such a level of violence in the centre, in Khartoum,” assures AFP Kholood Khair, who founded the Confluence Advisory research center in Khartoum.
Khartoum “was always the safest place in Sudan during the deadly wars against rebels” that began in Darfur and elsewhere in the 2000s, she continues.
“Today the fighting is all over the city, the FSRs are deployed everywhere and especially in densely populated areas because the belligerents believed that the possibility of high civilian casualties would deter the other camp: now we know that their fight for the Might be won at all costs,” adds Kholood Khair.