Heavy gunfire echoed around Khartoum on Friday as civilians trapped in the Sudanese capital said the army and rival paramilitary were fighting without regard to their plight.
Battles since mid-April have killed hundreds and wounded thousands, disrupted aid supplies, sent 100,000 refugees fleeing abroad and turned residential areas of Khartoum into war zones.
“It’s been four days without electricity and our situation is difficult,” said 48-year-old Othman Hassan from the southern outskirts of the city. “We are the victims of a war that we aren’t a part of. No one cares about the citizen.”
Smoke rose into the air in an area outside Khartoum’s presidential palace and across the River Nile in the adjoining city of Bahri, live footage on broadcaster Al Jazeera showed.
Despite multiple ceasefire declarations, the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) appeared to be fighting for territory ahead of proposed talks.
So far, army leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, a career military officer, and RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, a former militia leader known as Hemedti who comes from the strife-torn western region of Darfur, have shown little public willingness to negotiate.
Their power struggle risks dragging in outside powers, further destabilising an already restive region.
A group of countries led by Britain, the United States, Germany and Norway is set to request an urgent meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Council on the Sudan crisis next week, a document showed on Friday.
Across swathes of Khartoum, factories, banks and shops have been looted or damaged, power and water supplies have been failing and residents have reported steep price rises and shortages of basic goods.
Whole neighborhoods have emptied out, leading people to fear for the houses they left behind.
US Intelligence
The United States expects the fighting between two military chiefs in Sudan to continue as neither has an incentive to seek peace, US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines has said.
“The fighting in Sudan between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) is, we assess, likely to be protracted as both sides believe that they can win militarily and have few incentives to come to the negotiating table,” Haines told a US Senate hearing on Thursday.
“Both sides are seeking external sources of support, which, if successful, is likely to intensify the conflict and create a greater potential for spillover challenges in the region,” she said.
Haines, the top US intelligence official, said the fighting has exacerbated already-dire humanitarian conditions, “raising the spectre of massive refugee flows and aid needs in the region”.
Source: Agencies
