Fierce fighting rocked Khartoum on Sunday, attesting to the continuation of a merciless power struggle between the army and paramilitaries in Sudan, where the spread of disease and child malnutrition are a growing concern for humanitarian organizations.

Residents of the Sudanese capital woke up to another day to the sounds of “fierce fighting with all kinds of weapons,” one of them told AFP, and “fighter raids,” another added.

The paramilitaries claimed to have shot down an army plane and a remote-controlled drone in Bahri. The armed forces have not reacted so far.

Hostilities are intense in Khartoum and also in Darfur – a vast region roughly the size of France that borders Chad – where, in addition to military-paramilitary clashes, tribal fighters, local militias and armed citizens. The war has assumed “national dimensions” and “crimes against humanity” may be committed, according to the UN.

Since it broke out on April 15, the war has killed at least 3,000 people and made 2.8 million others internally displaced or refugees.

The government body fighting violence against women announced that it had recorded around a hundred sexual assaults, a number that is undoubtedly an underestimate as well as the number of human casualties, as victims and medical personnel are unable to move amid gunfire and bombs.

Rapes and displacements

The body said it had recorded “25 sexual attacks in Nyala, the capital of North Darfur state”, another “21 sexual attacks in El Jeneina”, the capital of East Darfur state, and “a further 42 in Khartoum”.

In the capital, “most survivors” testified that they were raped by members of General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo’s Rapid Support Force (RSF), while in Darfur “all” survivors “blamed the SRF”, according to the same source.

Most members of the DTY, fighting the army under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, are Janjaweed, members of the Arab militias that bloodied Darfur, especially the non-Arab minorities, in the 2000s on behalf of the regime of Omar al-Bashir. of the dictator who fell in 2019.

The new war has driven nearly 180,000 Darfurians into Chad, according to UN estimates.

In Sudan itself, nearly 2.2 million residents have been displaced. “Hundreds of thousands of people, mostly women and children” are crammed into “nine camps in White Nile state”, from southern Khartoum to the border with South Sudan, according to the NGO Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans frontières, MSF ).

“The situation is very serious: there are suspected cases of measles, while child malnutrition is a critical health emergency,” the organization warned, referring to one of the world’s poorest states, where even before the armed conflict broke out one resident in three he was faced with the specter of starvation.

“From June 6 to 27, we treated 223 children who may have had measles, 72 of whom were admitted to hospitals and 13 of whom died in the two hospitals we support,” MSF said.

The Union of Sudanese Doctors also accused the DTY the day before Saturday of attacking the Suhanda hospital, one of the few that continues to function almost normally in the country, and killing a staff member. The paramilitaries denied this.

Rains and epidemics

Humanitarian organizations do not stop calling for safe corridors to be created to gain access to the wounded and above all to the displaced; however, so far none of the ceasefires announced for this purpose have been respected.

Non-governmental organizations warn that time is running out as Sudan enters the rainy season, which runs from June to September. When flash floods hit dry land, flooding is common, blocking roads and causing dozens of deaths each year.

While stagnant rainwater favors the spread of epidemics, from malaria to cholera, passing through dengue fever.

Despite the highly urgent nature of the problem, meager diplomatic efforts so far by the Americans and the Saudis have yielded nothing tangible, as the two rival generals appear to be counting on their military dominance rather than a negotiated resolution to the crisis.

The African Union, Sudan’s neighbors, the Arab League and the UN have been calling for a solution from the region, to no avail so far.