Fighting continued to rage in Khartoum on Monday night despite a tentative week-long ceasefire agreement between the army and paramilitaries, ostensibly to allow civilians and humanitarian aid to cross into Sudan.

Since April 15, the war between the armed forces of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo has claimed the lives of at least a thousand people and displaced and displaced more than a a million others.

Usually, the fighting de-escalates at night. But last night, after the peace deal came into effect, at 10:45pm (Greece time), residents of the northeastern suburbs of Khartoum told AFP that clashes were ongoing.

And in the southern part of the Sudanese capital, residents said they “heard airstrikes after the scheduled ceasefire time”.

For the 37th consecutive 24 hours, Khartoum’s five million residents lived through another day of fighting amid sweltering heat, most without running water, electricity, telecommunications.

The UN recorded last night “fighting and troop movements while both sides have pledged not to seek to gain an advantage before the ceasefire comes into effect”.

Leave, go to a doctor, wait for the water to come

To restart essential services such as hospitals, to restock humanitarian aid depots and looted or bombed markets, US and Saudi mediators said they had secured, after two weeks of negotiations, a deal between the rivals that provides for a cease-fire for one week.

The two camps assured that they intend to abide by it. In Khartoum, however, residents say they see no sign that places are preparing for it.

“We don’t see any indication that the DTY, who still own roads, are preparing to abandon them,” Mahmoud Salahuddin, a resident of the Sudanese capital, said yesterday.

Although the military dominates the airwaves, it has few forces in the capital, while the DTY holds much of Khartoum. Residents accuse the paramilitaries of looting their homes, or setting up command centers in them.

About ten ceasefire agreements have been announced and left blank in the east African country, one of the poorest on the planet.

Still, resident Khaled Saleh wants to hope.

“If there is a ceasefire, the water might come back on and I might finally be able to see a doctor about my diabetes and high blood pressure,” he said.

Othman al-Zein, a trader in Darfur, the region of western Sudan that has been bloodied the most by the war like the capital, hopes for his part that he will be able to find an escape route.

“If a ceasefire is implemented everywhere in Sudan, although I doubt it, I will leave Nyala,” in South Sudan, he explained, “to find shelter and save my savings.”

As, beyond stray fire, what many Sudanese fear most is looting.

With 25 of the country’s 45 million people in need of humanitarian aid, according to the UN, food is increasingly scarce, banks are closed, most agri-food facilities – factories, shops, warehouses – have either been destroyed or looted.

“We are all hungry, children and old people, everyone is suffering from the war. We have no water,” summarizes Swad al-Fateh, a resident of the capital. “The two camps must come to a real agreement.”

“Surveillance mechanism”?

Terrified and hungry, thousands of Sudanese and refugees in Sudan are trying to flee the country every day. Their numbers in Chad are “growing rapidly” and are now around 90,000, up from 76,000 three days earlier, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said yesterday. If the armed conflict continues, at least a million more Sudanese could flee to neighboring states, which are concerned about the risk of the war spreading.

Doctors do not stop sounding the alarm about the dramatic state of the health system: in Khartoum as in Darfur, almost everything is out of order. Some were not bombed but there is nothing left of them, or they have been taken over by the warring parties.

The UN and humanitarian organizations are calling for safe corridors and, this time, Riyadh and Washington assure, there will be a “ceasefire monitoring mechanism” involving representatives of the warring parties, the US and Saudi Arabia.

At the Security Council in New York, Sudan’s ambassador to the UN, a loyalist to General Burhan, blamed the WDF for all but one of the atrocities recorded since April 15.

General Daglo returned the army’s accusations in recorded statements uploaded online, vowing to put an “end” to the “coup” and calling on his men to continue “fighting until victory or martyrdom”.

The UN special envoy to Sudan, Volker Pertes, admitted again that he was “taken aback” by the war that broke out between the two generals, who were supposed to be discussing the resumption of the country’s transition to democracy.

In 2021, they staged a coup together, halting the transition to democracy that began after thirty years of Omar al-Bashir’s dictatorship.

The two men were at odds over the terms of the DTY’s integration into the regular army.

On Friday, General Burhan announced that he had removed General Daghlo as second-in-command of the military regime and replaced him with Malik Aggar. The latter, a former rebel leader who signed a 2020 peace deal with Khartoum, met on Monday with South Sudanese President Salva Kiir, traditionally a mediator in Sudan’s wars.