An armed forces fighter-bomber was shot down on Tuesday while operating over the airspace of the Sudanese capital, where hostilities and heavy artillery shelling continue to rage, residents of Khartoum said.

“We saw the operators using their ejection seats and parachutes as the aircraft plunged towards the ground,” explained a resident of the northern part of the megacity.

A source close to the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) told AFP that the fighter jet was shot down by them.

The DTY assured that they captured its “pilot” after it landed, while they accused the army of committing “massacres” in the Khartoum area.

On April 15, war broke out between the armed forces under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Sudan’s de facto head of state after the 2021 coup, and DTY paramilitaries under General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, the junta’s deputy leader turned sworn in enemy of the first.

The conflict has killed some 3,000 people, according to the latest estimate by the non-governmental organization ACLED, and uprooted more than 2.8 million others, who have become either internally displaced or refugees, according to the UN.

A resident of Omdurman, a northern suburb of the capital, spoke yesterday of “fierce fighting with the use of various types of weapons”. Other eyewitnesses reported seeing “airstrikes” near “the state television building,” which DTY launched a raid against this week.

In the eastern part of the capital, residents reported that gun battles were also raging.

The army also used “rockets and heavy artillery” to hit DTY bases in the central and northern parts of the city, an eyewitness said. Houses were damaged and civilians were rushed to one of the few hospitals that remain in operation, another added.

In Khartoum, as in the vast western region of Darfur, hostilities are raging in highly populated areas, streets are littered with corpses and homes have been hit repeatedly by rockets and shells, civilians report.

The residents, in crossfire, have simultaneously been faced with dire shortages – of running water, food, electricity, medicine…– for the last almost three months.