Sudan: Heavy fighting between the army and a powerful rival force for control of the country has created a tense situation in Sudan. The battle continues for the third day taking the civilian death toll to cross 100-mark. Khartoum and adjourning cities like Omdurman on Monday witnessed airstrikes.
Rapid, sustained firing was heard near the military headquarters, with white smoke rising from the area. Residents hunkering down in their homes reported power outages and incidents of looting. “Gunfire and shelling are everywhere,” Awadeya Mahmoud Koko, head of a union for thousands of tea vendors and other food workers, said from her home in Khartoum. She said a shell stuck a neighbour’s house on Sunday, killing at least three people. “We couldn’t take them to a hospital or bury them.”
Clashes are part of a power struggle
The clashes are part of a power struggle between Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, the commander of the armed forces, and Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, the head of the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group. The two generals are former allies who jointly orchestrated an October 2021 military coup that derailed Sudan’s short-lived transition to democracy.
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Both men have dug in, saying they would not negotiate a truce, instead engaging in verbal attacks and demanding the other’s surrender. On Monday, Dagalo, whose forces grew out of the notorious Janjaweed militias in Sudan’s Darfur region, portrayed himself in a statement on Twitter as a defender of democracy and branded Burhan as the aggressor and a “radical Islamist”.
Both generals have a long history of human rights abuses
Pro-democracy activists have noted that both generals have a long history of human rights abuses. At the same time, both men have powerful foreign backers, making them potentially susceptible to mounting diplomatic pressure to end the fighting. Since fighting erupted on Saturday, 97 civilians have been killed and hundreds have been wounded, said the Sudan Doctors’ Syndicate, a pro-democracy group monitoring casualties.
There has been no official word on the number of fighters killed.
Footage posted online on Monday purported to show RSF barracks in Omdurman. The bodies of dozens of men in camouflage uniforms were seen sprawled on beds and the floor of a medical ward and in a sandy outdoor area. The authenticity of the videos could not be confirmed independently, but they surfaced after the military said it has targeted RSF bases with airstrikes. Mohmed al-Mokhtar al-Nour, an RSF adviser, told the Al Jazeera satellite network Sunday that RSF forces have withdrawn from the camp.
The chaotic scenes of fighting with tanks, truck-mounted machine guns, artillery and warplanes in densely populated areas of the capital are unprecedented. Sudan has a long history of civil strife, but much of that has taken place in remote tribal areas, far from Khartoum. Fighting also spread to the war-wrecked western Darfur region, and areas of northern and eastern Sudan, near the borders with Egypt and Ethiopia.
(with inputs from AP)
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