Sudan’s army and a rival paramilitary group are facing mounting international pressure to end a conflict that has claimed hundreds of lives since it erupted last weekend.
The African Union and representatives from organizations and governments including the U.S., China, U.K. and Russia, issued a joint statement late Thursday condemning the violence and calling for an immediate cease-fire, effective from midnight. The plea went unheeded, with several residents reporting heavy fire in Khartoum, the capital, and the city of Omdurman on Friday.
The fighting between the military, which is headed by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo has killed at least 330 people and left almost 3,200 others wounded, according to the World Health Organization. With parts of the North African country rendered a no-fly zone and supplies of water, fuel and other essentials in increasingly short supply, foreign governments are struggling to evacuate their citizens.
Burhan has spoken to a number of global leaders, including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who all emphasized the need for the situation to return to normal, the army said in a statement on its Facebook page.
“Our country has suffered serious injury, where the killed and the wounded have fallen, families have been displaced, and homes destroyed,” Burhan said in a video address on Friday. “We are confident that we will overcome this ordeal.”
While the RSF on Friday announced that it would implement a 72-hour cease-fire starting from 6 a.m. so people could celebrate the end of the Ramadan fast and the Eid holiday, the army hasn’t reciprocated. Two previous RSF announcements of a cessation in hostilities also failed to hold.
Some of the worst violence has taken place in al-Fasher in the western Darfur region, according to Cyrus Paye, project coordinator for Doctors Without Borders. He said he’d seen 279 wounded people since the fighting began on April 15 and 44 of them had died.
“The situation is catastrophic,” he said. “The majority of the wounded are civilians who were hit by stray bullets, and many of them are children. They have fractures caused by bullets, or they have gunshot wounds or shrapnel in their legs, their abdomen or their chest.”
There has also been intense fighting in Khartoum, with many people trapped in the vicinity of the army headquarters and presidential palace and running out of food and water.
The conflict, the culmination of a long-simmering power struggle between the army and the RSF, has upended plans for a power-sharing government that was supposed to lead the nation of about 45 million people to democratic elections after a 2021 coup. Tens of thousands of Sudanese have fled into neighboring Chad, according to the U.N.
The U.S., Japan and Germany have all said they are making plans to evacuate their citizens.
Several thousand Indian nationals are also stuck in Sudan. External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said on Twitter that he’s spoken to his counterparts in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and met Guterres, to discuss their repatriation.
The Indian Embassy in Sudan issued a fresh advisory over the weekend urging Indians not to venture out of their residences and keep their documents ready to allow for quick movement “when feasible.”
South Korea will dispatch a C-130J military transport aircraft and about 50 personnel, including pilots, mechanics and medical officials, to help evacuate its citizens in Sudan, Yonhap News reported, citing the defense ministry.
____
(With assistance from Sudhi Ranjan Sen, Okech Francis, Seyoon Kim and Paul Richardson.)
