United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Monday called on Generals Abdelfatá Al Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo – respectively at the head of the Sudanese army and the powerful Fast Support Force militia – to end the bitter fighting they are facing. to prevent the situation from escalating into a more general civil war. Guterres also condemned…
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United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Monday called on Generals Abdelfatá Al Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo – respectively at the head of the Sudanese army and the powerful Fast Support Force militia – to end the bitter fighting they are facing. to prevent the situation from escalating into a more general civil war. Guterres also condemned the hostilities, which continued Monday for the third consecutive day in the capital Khartoum and other parts of the country, without any effect from the international community’s increased efforts to end them. According to the latest census by a local medical committee, almost a hundred civilians have been killed and more than a thousand wounded.
“The situation has already claimed a horrific number of lives, including many civilians. Any new escalation could be devastating for the country and the region,” said Guterres from New York, calling on “everyone who has an influence on the situation to use it for the cause of peace”.
On the ground, the two warring sides showed little sign of wanting to end fighting on Monday. Sudanese forces said in the morning that clashes were concentrated in central Khartoum and around the general command and the international airport, where satellite images show fires have broken out over the past 24 hours. The army continues to shell Rapid Support Forces bases in the capital. And he has assured that the paramilitaries are trying to shift the clashes to populated areas inside the city.
“Fighting has been going on since morning and planes are flying through the air. We don’t know who will win or who will be beaten. Radio and national television don’t work,” explains a lawyer from Khartoum, who asked not to be named.
The country’s foreign ministry, which is allied with the army, reported on Monday that the commander of the armed forces, Abdelfatá Al Burhan, issued an order to declare a rebel group and disband the Rapid Support Forces, which was legalized in 2017. In statements to Sky News, the general assured that he was in the Defense Ministry complex in Khartoum and assured that he did not rule out negotiations, but that for now his goal remained to defeat the paramilitary forces.
For their part, the Rapid Support Forces continued to speak of “landslide victories” on Monday, but the situation on the ground and the control of strategic points remain unclear. The paramilitary group and its commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, whose whereabouts are unknown, in a statement described senior army officials as “radical Islamists” who want to “keep Sudan isolated”.
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According to calculations by an independent medical committee, 97 civilians have been killed and around a thousand injured, including soldiers, since the clashes began on Saturday. The dead are concentrated in the capital, Khartoum, but are also documented in other regions of the country.
One of the main concerns is that clashes, hitherto centered in Khartoum, will shift and escalate to peripheral regions like Darfur in the west, where clashes have already broken out. Some of these areas are the strongholds of armed groups that have so far stayed out of the fighting, but there are fears that their prolongation and expansion could eventually bring them down.
“There are clashes between the army and [las Fuerzas de Apoyo Rápido] in the city of Nyala [capital de Darfur del Sur]and the displaced people in the camps and citizens in all Darfur towns are living in a state of panic and fear,” said Adam Rojal, a spokesman for Darfur’s internally displaced people from the area.
The fighting in the country is part of a long struggle between Al Burhan and Dagalo for power in Sudan, which has been plunged into a situation of great instability since the two generals, now at odds, staged a coup in October 2021 that ended the democratic Transition that began in 2019 after the fall of dictator Omar al Bashir.
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