The fighting is so intense, and taking place in so many different parts of the country at once, that Sudan could be getting dangerously close to full-blown civil war. The regular army and the paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces (FAR) have been waging an open armed confrontation since Saturday. Both sides blame each other for having to defend against the other’s attack. With corpses in the streets and with thousands of civilians hiding in their homes, the country plunges into chaos.
The renowned Sudanese Central Committee of Doctors reported yesterday that in the first 48 hours of fighting, at least 56 civilians would have died and some 600 would have been injured (some of them combatants), some of them doomed to almost certain death due to the seriousness of their state and the impossibility of carrying out medicalized transfers in some streets of the main cities taken over by violence or blocked by one or the other side.
Dozens of soldiers have already died, the doctors’ committee said, without giving a specific figure due to the lack of first-hand information from the hospitals where those casualties were taken.
Precisely, the Red Cross has launched a series of messages warning about the continuation of fighting in immensely populated areas of the country, which redoubles the danger for the civilian population. Precisely, with the aim of mitigating some of these dangers and being able to evacuate people at risk, a three-hour truce was declared yesterday afternoon, the degree of compliance of which is unknown.
The country’s capital, Khartoum, is one of the scenarios where the fighting is most intense and where a propaganda battle is also being waged. The FAR assure that they have control of the airport, while the army denies it. Something similar occurs with the headquarters of the Army Command, which has been severely attacked by the paramilitaries -dense columns of smoke were seen yesterday, coming from the building-, although the regular troops assure that they keep it under their control.
According to sources quoted by Reuters, the army is taking a certain military advantage after numerous air strikes on FAR bases.
In this environment of chaos, three employees of the World Food Program were killed in the Darfur region, an area where it is believed that the fighting is being especially harsh. This body, dependent on the UN, has reported that until further notice its operations are completely paralyzed in Sudan.
This type of situation threatens even more the lives of the civilians locked up in those buildings where the fighting has surprised them. People have been known to be locked up in schools, shops and offices. Power outages are the order of the day.
A Spanish aid worker, Jofre Rocabert, an analyst with the Norwegian Refugee Council, was about to start his return trip when he was trapped in Sudan on Saturday. Rocabert is hiding in a place belonging to his organization from where, miraculously and thanks to some solar panels, he keeps some electrical equipment running and was able to be interviewed yesterday by the RAC1 radio station.
“We try not to make noise so as not to attract attention, which is why we have given up using the electric generator. Throughout the early morning neither the shooting nor the bombardments have stopped,†explained the aid worker.
But the list of personal situations in a very delicate situation is very long. “We are afraid, we haven’t slept for 24 hours because of the noise and the shaking in the house. We are worried about running out of water and food, and medicine for my diabetic father,” Huda, a young resident of southern Khartoum, told Reuters.
International efforts are currently focused on getting both sides to declare a ceasefire. At the height of the fighting are two people who seem to be irreconcilable enemies: the leader of the FAR, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, and the head of the Sudanese Army, General Abdelfatah al Burhan. It seems that both want to position themselves as well as possible with a view to the arrival of democracy in the country and eventual elections.
Despite the will of countries such as Egypt or South Sudan, which have offered to mediate, the representative of Sudan in the Arab League, Al Sadiq Omar Abdalá, asked the other countries in the organization not to interfere. “We recommend that the matter be left to the Sudanese to complete the settlement among themselves,” he said.
