AT least 185 people have been killed and a further 1,800 injured in three days of fighting between rival factions in Sudan, according to the United Nations special representative for Sudan, as the Group of Seven joined calls for an immediate to end to hostilities.
“It’s a very fluid situation so it’s very difficult to say where the balance is shifting to,” Volker Perthes said on Monday of the violence between the army and paramilitary forces led by rival generals.
The two sides are using tanks, artillery and other heavy weapons in densely populated areas. Fighter jets thundered overhead and anti-aircraft fire lit up the skies as darkness fell.
Speaking to reporters in New York via video, Perthes also said that the warring sides were “not giving the impression that they want mediation for a peace between them right away”.
The sudden outbreak of violence over the weekend between the nation’s two top generals, each backed by tens of thousands of heavily armed fighters, trapped millions of people in their homes or wherever they could find shelter, with supplies running low in many areas.
The power struggle pits General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the commander of the armed forces, against General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the head of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group. The former allies jointly orchestrated an October 2021 military coup.
“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 a southern district of Khartoum.
She said a shell stuck a neighbour’s house Sunday, killing at least three people. “We couldn’t take them to a hospital or bury them.”
The violence has raised the spectre of civil war just as Sudanese were trying to revive the drive for a democratic, civilian government after decades of military rule.
