Paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which are fighting with the army for power in Sudan, attacked a town south of the capital Khartoum on Friday, residents told AFP.

Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Daglo’s SDF are “looting banks and public buildings” in the town of Bara, 50 kilometers northeast of the town of El Ubaid, the capital of North Kordofan state, a resident said.

“They terrorize us: they shoot and loot and the army and the police have disappeared,” complained another, Abdelmusen Ibrahim.

According to the latter, it was already too late to intervene: “even if the army tried to send forces from El Obeid, the DTY controls the El Obeid – Barra road,” he explained.

El Ubaid, 350 kilometers south of the capital, is considered of strategic importance, as it is a logistics and commercial hub, in particular it has an airport and huge warehouses of food and exported products.

Since the outbreak of armed conflict on April 15, many residents have complained of paramilitary atrocities and that General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan’s armed forces are not protecting them. The allegations concern the capital Khartoum, Darfur, a vast region in the western part of the country where the United Nations says it records “crimes against humanity”, and North Kordofan.

In Omdurman, a northern suburb of Khartoum, eyewitnesses spoke of “air strikes in the sector where the headquarters of the public radio station is located and anti-aircraft fire”.

A resident spoke of an air strike against a DTY base in the northern part of the Sudanese capital.

At the diplomatic level, IGAD, an organization of East African states, announced that it is organizing a meeting the day after tomorrow, Monday, in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia).

Rival generals Daglo and Burhan may meet there for talks, an AFP source at IGAD said on Friday on condition of anonymity.

“They may participate or send high-level representatives,” it said.

IGAD recently announced that Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and South Sudan will join the diplomatic mechanism it created to resolve the armed conflict in Sudan.

The army, which was seized on a six-day morning in the month of Ramadan, has been exploiting its advantage in the airwaves since the start of hostilities: it alone has military aircraft. The DTY, on the other hand, have established bases in densely populated areas, while relying on mobile units, moving in vans to which they have adapted weapons, including anti-aircraft guns.

These small groups occupy homes, steal vehicles and other goods and force residents to flee, many of whom flee to neighboring countries, citizens and NGOs report. They are also accused by the same sources of attacks against civilians, especially women, and rape.

On Thursday, residents of the capital and Darfur said hostilities continued unabated, with airstrikes, artillery fire and fighting.

In nearly three months, the war between the two rival generals for power, which has turned into a conflict with ethnic and tribal dimensions in Darfur, has, according to the UN, claimed at least 3,000 lives and turned nearly three million civilians into displaced persons and refugees.