Fighting in Sudan enters second week as truce shatters
Fighting in Sudan’s capital entered a second week yesterday as crackling gunfire shattered a temporary truce, the latest battles between forces of rival generals that have already left hundreds dead and thousands wounded.
Overnight, the heavy explosions that had previously rocked the city in recent days had subsided, but yesterday morning, bursts of gunfire resumed.
Heavy gunfire, loud explosions, and fighter jets roared in many parts of the capital by yesterday morning, according to witnesses.
Violence broke out on April 15 between forces loyal to army chief Abdel Fattah alBurhan and his deputy turned rival Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who commands the powerful paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
The former allies seized power in a 2021 coup but later fell out in a bitter power struggle.
The army announced Friday that it had “agreed to a ceasefire for three days” for the Eid al-Fitr holiday that marks the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which UN Secretary-General António Guterres and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had called for a day earlier.
Daglo said in a statement he had “discussed the current crisis” with Guterres, and was
“focused on the humanitarian truce, safe passages, and protecting humanitarian workers”.
Two previous 24-hour ceasefires announced earlier in the week were also ignored.
The fighting has seen the RSF – a force tens of thousands strong, formed from members of the Janjaweed militia that led years of violence in the western Darfur region – take on the regular army, with neither side seemingly having seized the advantage.
‘STEncH oF BlooD’
In Khartoum, a city of five million people, the conflict upended the lives of civilians, who have sheltered in terror inside their homes without electricity in baking heat for days.
Many civilians have ventured out only to get urgent food supplies or to flee the city.
Eid is meant to be spent “with sweets and pastries, with happy children, and people greeting relatives”, resident Sami al-Nour told AFP. Instead, there has been “gunfire and the stench of blood all around us”.
While Khartoum has seen some of the fiercest battles violence also exploded across the country.