Despite the ceasefire, fighting continues in Sudan

Fighting continued in Sudan on Friday in Khartoum and particularly in the Darfur region, despite an extended ceasefire between the army and paramilitaries fighting a war that has killed more than 500 people in nearly two weeks.

Before the three-day ceasefire expired at midnight (22:00 GMT), the two camps, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s army and General Mohamed Hamdan Daghlo’s Support Forces (FSR), were not respected. , known as “Hemety”, announced that it had approved a 72-hour extension of the ceasefire.

In a joint statement issued in Washington, the members of the “Quad” on Sudan (Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States) and members of the African Union and the United Nations considered the extension “welcome”. It called for a ceasefire and “its full enforcement” and “unfettered humanitarian access”.

But since the start of the conflict, on April 15, thousands have been injured, and the capital, Khartoum, has been bombarded every day by military aircraft and paramilitary heavy artillery. Other cities have been affected by the fighting, particularly in the Darfur region (west) on the border with Chad.

Lawyers and doctors in Sudan sounded the alarm on Friday for Darfur, which has been ravaged by deadly fighting that has not abated despite a ceasefire.

In El-Genina, the capital of West Darfur, militants fired “submachine guns, heavy machine guns and anti-aircraft fire machines” and “fired rockets at houses,” the Darfur Bar Association said. UN For its part it mentions that “weapons are distributed” to civilians.

The doctors’ association says the violence escalated after the foreigners left, citing a “massacre” that left “dozens dead and injured”.

Some 50,000 children in Darfur are “severely malnourished” without food aid, warns the UN, which suspended its operations there after five humanitarian workers died at the start of the war.
The civil war that began in 2003 between Omar al-Bashir, who was deposed in 2019, and ethnic minority rebels has left around 300,000 dead and nearly 2.5 million displaced. , UN According to

Damaging hopes for a democratic transition, the two competing generals now oust citizens from power in a coup in 2021. But they disagreed on integrating the auxiliary into the army before going to war on April 15.

In Khartoum, residents of this city of five million people are trying to flee by all means. No more water or electricity. Internet and phone work intermittently. Gasoline ran out, money ran out.

“Burhane and Hemeti must immediately stop this senseless war being waged on the backs of the public everywhere in Sudan and especially in El-Jenina and Khartoum,” the Bar Association urged.
The fighting has sparked a mass exodus in the country of 45 million people, one of the world’s poorest.

Many tens of thousands of people have already arrived in neighboring countries, especially Ethiopia in the east and Egypt in the north, where according to Egyptian officials, more than 14,000 Sudanese and 2,000 nationals of other countries have arrived. According to the United Nations, a total of 270,000 people could flee to Chad and South Sudan.

Foreigners, for their part, now mostly leave by sea. A new Saudi ship arrived in the port city of Jeddah (west) on Thursday evening, bringing the number of people evacuated by Riyadh to 2,744.

Several countries around the world, including the US, China, France and the UK, have evacuated their nationals from Sudan in recent days.