Fierce fighting continued to rage in Khartoum and Darfur on Friday despite the extension of a ceasefire agreement between the army and paramilitaries, who have been embroiled in a war for power in Sudan that has killed at least 500 people in almost two weeks.

In El Jenaina, the capital of West Darfur, 74 people were killed in two days of fighting on Monday and Tuesday, a doctors’ union said, stressing that the toll was only provisional and that the dead in recent days were impossible to count. as all hospitals have been put “out of order”.

Across the country “the health system is on the brink of complete collapse” and “12,000 patients suffering from kidney failure are at risk of dying because of the lack of hemodialysis,” the Sudanese doctors’ union warned.

On the night of Thursday into Friday, the armed forces of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo agreed to an extension for another 72 hours of the cease-fire that was brokered by the US but was never kept in practice.

“Cease-fire violations do not mean that it has failed,” State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said yesterday while speaking to the press.

In Khartoum, airstrikes and anti-aircraft fire could be heard near army headquarters, witnesses told AFP.

In Darfur, “the situation is always very tense,” said a resident in Jenaina. “The markets have been looted and there is no more food.”

According to him, properties and camps of internally displaced people suffered “great damage” and the electricity has been “cut since Monday”.

“Mercenaries”

Lawyers and doctors are sounding the alarm for the state of Darfur, which neighbors Chad. In El Jenaina, the warring parties are using “machine guns, heavy machine guns, anti-aircraft guns” and firing “rockets at houses”, the Darfur Bar Association said.

“Burhan and Hameti must immediately stop this stupid war on the backs of civilians,” they stressed.

The UN has expressed concern over the fact that “weapons were distributed” to civilians. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights warns that the fighting could reignite tribal and ethnic conflicts in West Darfur and says it is alarmed by a “climate of generalized impunity”.

Some 50,000 “acutely malnourished” children in the region are without food aid after the UN suspended operations following the killings of five workers.

Little information comes out of this region, where the war that broke out in 2003 between the regime of General Omar al-Bashir, who fell in 2019, and rebels belonging to ethnic minorities resulted in the death of 300,000 people and the displacement of another 2 .5 million, according to the UN.

The rivals continue to accuse each other of ceasefire violations. The army complained that the DTY opened fire on a Turkish military aircraft, which went to the country to urgently evacuate citizens of Turkey. Ankara confirmed that a Turkish plane had come under fire, clarifying that there were no injuries, according to the state-run Anadolu news agency.

General Burhan complained during an interview he gave to the Al-Hura television network that “mercenaries from Chad, the Central African Republic and Niger” are now involved in hostilities.

“This war is destroying Sudan,” said General Daglo for his part during an interview he gave to the BBC, calling his enemy a “traitor”.

Refugees

At the diplomatic level, the two generals announced that they had talks with officials of the US, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and South Sudan.

Juba expresses concern over the “already visible spillover” of the armed conflict, especially the flows of “refugees” into neighboring states.

Tens of thousands of refugees have already crossed the border, taking refuge mainly in Chad (west) and Egypt (north). In total, the UN estimates that up to 270,000 civilians may have fled to Chad and South Sudan.

A representative of General Burhan is expected in Cairo today to meet with the head of Egyptian diplomacy, Sameh Shoukry.

Erasing the hopes that the country’s transition process to democracy would resume, the two generals who expelled the citizens from the interim government with them in the coup d’état of October 2021 are continuing the war in which they got involved in mid-April, the reason for which was their disagreement on the conditions for the inclusion of paramilitaries in the regular forces.

In Khartoum, the five million residents have no running water, electricity, often no telephone or internet access. Fuel and fluid are also starting to run low.

Western countries, notably the US, France, Canada and Britain, continue to hastily evacuate hundreds of people. For its part, China announced that it had removed the majority of its own nationals who were in Sudanese territory.

Another Saudi ship arrived in Jeddah (west) on Friday, bringing to 2,991 the number of people hastily evacuated from Sudan by Saudi Arabia, which has hosted the majority of foreigners who have fled the war-torn country by sea.