By Khaled Abdelaziz and Nafisa Eltahir
KHARTOUM (Reuters) -Sudan’s army and a paramilitary force battled in Khartoum on Thursday, testing U.S. and African efforts to pause a conflict that has turned residential areas into war zones and sent tens of thousands of people fleeing for their lives.
Hundreds of people have been killed in nearly two weeks of conflict between the army and a rival paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which are locked in a power struggle threatening to destabilise the wider region.
The RSF accused the army of carrying out air strikes on its forces on Thursday and spreading “false rumours”. It made no reference to a proposal for talks which the army said came from African regional bloc the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD).
An army statement said its forces had taken control of most of Sudan’s regions but added “the situation is a bit complicated in some parts of the capital” Khartoum where it claimed to be defeating a large deployment of RSF.
Air strikes and anti-aircraft fire could be heard in Khartoum and the nearby cities of Omdurman and Bahri, witnesses and Reuters journalists said.
An existing three-day ceasefire brought about a partial lull in fighting, but is due to expire at midnight (2200 GMT).
Though the fighting has been focused in Khartoum, where RSF fighters have embedded themselves in residential areas, it has also spread to the western province of Darfur, where conflict has simmered ever since civil war erupted there two decades ago.
The Darfur Bar Association, a rights group, said at least 52 people had died in attacks by well-armed “militias” on residential neighbourhoods in the town of El Geneina, as well as its main hospital, main market, government buildings and several shelters for internally displaced people.
The city, Sudan’s western-most, has been the site of repeated tribal conflicts in recent years, leading to surrounding populations being displaced multiple times.
Many foreign nationals remain stuck in Sudan despite an exodus marking one of the largest such evacuations since the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces from Afghanistan in 2021. Sudanese civilians, who have been struggling to find food, water and fuel, continued to flee Khartoum on Thursday.
The army said its leader, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, had given initial approval to the IGAD plan to extend the truce for another 72 hours and to send an army envoy to the South Sudan capital Juba for talks.
The military said the presidents of South Sudan, Kenya and Djibouti worked on a proposal that includes extending the truce and talks between the two forces. Their conflict derailed a transition to civilian democracy after a 2021 military coup.
HUNDREDS OF DEATHS
At least 512 people have been killed and close to 4,200 wounded by the fighting since April 15.
The crisis has sent growing numbers of refugees across Sudan’s borders. Thousands of people, mainly Sudanese, have been waiting at the border to cross north into Egypt.
The conflict has limited food distribution in the vast nation, Africa’s third largest, where a third of the 46 million people were already reliant on humanitarian aid.
The top U.N. aid official in Sudan, Abdou Dieng, said “very little can be done” in terms of humanitarian assistance.
“We’re extremely worried about food supply,” Diengtold told reporters in New York via phone from Port Sudan where most senior U.N. staff had relocated.
“Our aim is to go back as quick as possible to Khartoum if the situation allows it,” he said.
Some 16,000 people have entered Egypt from Sudan including 14,000 Sudanese citizens, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry said. The U.N. says some 20,000 refugees have already gone to Chad.
France said on Thursday it had evacuated more people from Sudan, including Britons, Americans, Canadians, Ethiopians, Dutch, Italians and Swedes. Britain said it might not be able to continue evacuating nationals when the ceasefire ends, and they should try to reach British flights out of Sudan immediately.
At International University of Africa in Khartoum, where thousands of students waited to leave, food is running out, there is no water for toilets and showers, and the power is out, said Nigerian law student Umar Yusuf Yaru, 24.
“Even as we sit here, almost everywhere you can hear gunshots. We are not safe here,” Yaru said via Zoom, as some female students could be heard crying in the background.
The Sudan Doctors’ Union said 60 out of 86 hospitals in conflict zones had stopped operating.
Tension had been building for months between Sudan’s army and the RSF, which together toppled a civilian government in an October 2021 coup, two years after a popular uprising toppled long-ruling Islamist autocrat Omar al-Bashir.
(Reporting by Khaled Abdelaziz, Eltayeb Siddig in Khartoum, Mariana Sandoval in London, Nafisa Eltahir in Cairo, Tala Ramadan in Dubai, Jehad Abu Shalbak and Muath Freij from Amman, MacDonald Dzirutwe in Lagos, Denis Elamu in Juba, Michelle Nichols in New York; Writing by Tom Perry and William Maclean; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore, Alexandra Hudson)
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