Sudan ruling council declares rival faction ‘rebels’
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Sudan’s battling factions are both claiming to have made gains as continued violence cut power and water in the capital and the United Nations envoy to Sudan says the two sides show no signs of being willing to negotiate.
The rupture between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has killed at least 185 people and injured more than 1800, UN envoy Volker Perthes said amid air strikes and fighting in Khartoum and strife across Sudan.
Their deadly power struggle has derailed a shift to civilian rule and raised fears of a wider conflict.
Smoke hung over the capital and residents reported a clamour of airstrikes, artillery fire and shooting that shut hospitals in a city unused to violence.
“The two sides who are fighting are not giving the impression that they want mediation for a peace between them right away,” Perthes told reporters by videolink from Khartoum.
He said the sides had agreed a three-hour humanitarian truce.
But for a second consecutive day fighting continued despite the promises of calm, according to al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya TV reporters broadcasting from Khartoum.
The fighting in Khartoum and its adjoining sister cities of Omdurman and Bahri since Saturday is the worst in decades and risks tearing Sudan between two military factions that had shared power during a rocky political transition.
Army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan heads a ruling council installed after a 2021 coup and the 2019 ousting of veteran leader Omar Bashir during mass protests.
RSF leader General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, is his deputy.
Under an internationally backed transition plan, the RSF was shortly due to merge with the army.
Burhan on Monday branded the RSF a rebel group and ordered it be dissolved as the two sides exchanged bitter accusations.
In comments to Sky News, Burhan said he was secure in a presidential guesthouse within the defence ministry compound.
He said his goal was to defeat the RSF but did not rule out some form of negotiation.
“Every war ends at the negotiation table even if the opponent is defeated”, Burhan said.
RSF leader Hemedti, whose whereabouts since Saturday are unknown, called for the international community to take action against what he called Burhan’s crimes.
In a tweet, he called the army chief “a radical Islamist who is bombing civilians from the air”.
There was no sign on Monday that either side was willing to back down.
While the army is larger and has air power, the RSF is widely deployed inside neighbourhoods of Khartoum and other cities, making it hard for either side to secure a quick victory.
Fighting between the sides in Darfur has meanwhile raised the spectre of renewed conflict in the western region that from 2003 was plagued by years of bloody warfare that killed as many as 300,000 people and displaced 2.7 million.
Offices, schools and petrol stations in the capital were shut on Monday while health services were widely disrupted and four major hospitals said they had been damaged and two were out of action due to the clashes.
There has been no police presence on the streets of Khartoum since Saturday and witnesses reported cases of looting.
UN chief Antonio Guterres condemned the outbreak of fighting and urged a return to calm, saying an already precarious humanitarian situation was now catastrophic.
The RSF claimed it had captured an airport and military bases while the military said it was in control of its headquarters despite what it called “limited clashes” in the vicinity.
Reuters verified video showing RSF forces in some of those locations but could not verify battlefield claims.
The army regained control of the main television station, which briefly went off air after gunfire was heard during a live broadcast.
The station began broadcasting videos showing the army destroying RSF vehicles, a day after the RSF said it had taken over the building.
Reuters
