New airstrikes hit Khartoum on Sunday, while fighting raged in the western Darfur region as the power struggle between Sudan’s armed forces and paramilitaries entered its fourth month with no sign of abating. soon.

In the capital, armed forces jets struck “bases” of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), who retaliated using “anti-aircraft weapons”, witnesses told AFP.

A local resistance group said five were killed and 17 wounded in one of the strikes, without specifying which side launched it.

Residents reported that DTY drones targeted Khartoum’s largest hospital, the day after a similar attack on the same health facility left 5 dead and 22 wounded, according to the military.

Since April 15, hostilities between the armed forces of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the DTY of General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo have claimed the lives of at least 3,300 people and forced more than 3 million people from their homes.

In Darfur, a vast region that was already bloodied by a civil war in the 2000s, eyewitnesses spoke yesterday Sunday of fierce fighting, “with various types of weapons”, in the city of Kas, about 80 kilometers northwest of Nyala, the capital of the state South Darfur.

Residents of Kas complained that paramilitaries ransacked houses, while in their announcement, the DTY spoke of their “victory” in this community.

Fighting in Darfur

The DTY “welcomed” the decision of a police force in East Darfur state to join their ranks, while South Darfur tribal chiefs also pledged allegiance to the paramilitaries.

The Sudanese Interior Ministry, for its part, said in a statement on Sunday that the police remained “the most ardent supporter of the armed forces” in Khartoum and praised “the efforts” being made by them in the rest of the country.

Moreover, the day before yesterday Saturday, the DTY “categorically” denied a recent report by the non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) which referred to the executions of “at least 28 members of the Masalit tribe”, a non-Arab minority, as well as the “total destruction of Mysterei community’, in West Darfur state.

Attributing these violent incidents to “long-standing inter-tribal conflicts”, the paramilitaries assured that they “respect international humanitarian law”.

Multiple sources report massacres of civilians and ethnically or racially motivated killings of victims in Darfur, attributed to paramilitary and/or allied Arab armed groups.

In the early 2000s, General Daglo, then head of the Arab Janjaweed paramilitaries, implemented a scorched earth policy against the ethnic minorities in Darfur, on the orders of the then dictator Omar al-Bashir.

That war had claimed the lives of 300,000 people, according to the United Nations.

Janjaweed reincarnated in DTY, officially in 2013.

Mr. Bashir has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for the atrocities of that period, notably genocide.

The ICC prosecutor general has opened a new investigation into war crimes in the current hostilities, particularly sexual violence and the targeting of civilians because of their ethnic or racial identity.

Resumption of negotiations?

Negotiations under the auspices of Saudi Arabia and the US in recent months have produced cease-fire agreements – all of which have been systematically violated from the moment they were implemented – but Riyadh and Washington effectively suspended their diplomatic initiatives in June.

But an AFP government source said Saturday that “a delegation of the armed forces” was returning to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, “to resume negotiations with the DTY rebels.”

The other side did not comment on the possible resumption of talks.

According to UN figures, the war has now displaced 2.4 million civilians within the country and forced another 740,000 to become refugees, mostly in neighboring states, many of which are themselves facing economic crises and/or political instability .

The governments of Sudan’s seven neighboring countries met Thursday in Cairo and appealed for help from international donors, appealing for the international community to “keep its promises.”