Global Courant 2023-05-16 14:10:44
The Sudanese capital of Khartoum has turned into a desolate war zone after a month of fierce fighting between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
Shocked families have gathered at home, with civilian homes becoming the collateral damage in the firefights raging in the streets between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s troops and RSF head Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo.
Khartoum residents have endured weeks of desperate food shortages, power cuts, communication breakdowns and runaway inflation. Before fighting broke out on April 15, the city of five million people was considered a place of relative stability, but now it is regularly subject to shelling and air raids.
Charred planes lie on the tarmac of the airport, foreign embassies are closed and hospitals, banks, shops and wheat silos have been looted by looters.
Violence also resumed in El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur state, leaving hundreds dead and the health system “completely collapsing”, medics said.
According to witnesses, fighting continued on Monday, with loud explosions in Khartoum and thick smoke in the air as warplanes fired anti-aircraft fire.
“The situation is getting worse by the day,” said a 37-year-old resident of South Khartoum, who declined to be named for security reasons.
“People are getting more and more scared because the two sides…are getting more and more violent.”
Another witness reported “clashes with different types of weapons” in Omdurman, the capital’s sister city.
Nearly a million people have been displaced by the conflict, many of them seeking refuge in Port Sudan, some 850 kilometers away.
According to the United Nations, more than 700,000 people have been internally displaced by the fighting and nearly 200,000 have fled Sudan to neighboring countries.
There are fears for the stability of the wider region.
“We were left on the street, in the sun,” complained Hamden Mohammed, who had fled from the Khartoum area to Port Sudan. “We want the organizations to evacuate us from Sudan, because the country has been completely destroyed. There is no food, no work…nothing.”
Doctors say about 1,000 people have died, mainly in and around Khartoum and in the devastated state of West Darfur.
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