At least 46 people were killed and dozens wounded in airstrikes in Khartoum on Sunday, activists said, among the deadliest on record in Sudan’s capital, a country still reeling from a war that broke out nearly five months ago.

The army under the command of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the only fighter in this armed conflict, has denied any involvement in the strikes, after being blamed for them by rival Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitaries.

Since April 15, the war for power in Sudan between the armed forces and General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo’s YPG has killed at least 7,500 people, according to the latest NGO estimate, and has turned nearly five million others into internally displaced persons. and refugees, according to the UN.

The actual death toll is believed to be much higher, as many areas of the country are cut off from the world, especially in the vast Darfur (west), while the warring parties do not announce their losses.

According to a local resistance committee – a grassroots organization of pro-democracy fighters that spearheads mutual aid among residents – shelling “launched by military aircraft” targeted the Kouro district in southern Khartoum.

The raids took place “around 07:15 [τοπική ώρα· στις 08:15 ώρα Ελλάδας] against the market,” said the Kourou resistance committee, complaining that a “massacre” had been committed.

The death toll later increased to “at least 46 dead”, while “dozens [άλλοι άμαχοι] they are injured,” he added.

Yesterday morning, General Burhan’s “terrorists” “launched airstrikes against civilians in southern Khartoum”, DTY reported via X (the former Twitter).

In a press release carried by Sudan’s official SUNA news agency, General Burhan’s army denied being behind “airstrikes against civilians” in Kouro and rejected “the false accusations of the rebels”, the DTY.

Hospital in despair

After the bombings, wounded and dead bodies were taken to the nearest hospital, Bashir, one of the few left in operation in the Sudanese capital, where five million people live through water and power cuts in sweltering heat, confined to their homes for to protect themselves from crossfire.

The hospital made an “urgent” appeal for all the doctors in the area to go there, in the face of the mass influx of wounded.

General Burhan’s army is struggling in Khartoum, where paramilitaries have taken over densely populated districts. DTY has been installing bases between houses for years now.

Experts point out that the armed forces rely more and more on their air superiority.

While at the military level the DTY seems to have taken the upper hand, General Burhan multiplied his contacts abroad trying to assert himself as the sole interlocutor in the efforts to resolve the crisis.

Diplomatic tensions

Under siege by the paramilitaries for more than four months at the armed forces headquarters in Khartoum, General Burhan was able in late August to reach Port Sudan, a coastal city in the eastern part of the country that has so far remained unscathed by the war.

He moved both the headquarters of the armed forces and the seat of the transitional authorities there — he is the de facto head of state after ousting the citizens from the government in a 2021 coup.

The various international mediation efforts have so far invariably failed, in part, experts say, because diplomatic channels are in practice competitive.

On the one hand are the Saudis and the Americans, on the other the African Union and IGAD, an East African regional organization, who are in favor of “African solutions to African problems”.

Tensions have risen between the military and the African Union following a meeting last week between one of its leaders and a DTY officer.

The Sudanese Foreign Ministry ruled that the pan-African organization “must not give way to rebel movements or terrorist paramilitary organizations.”

Last Saturday, General Burhan explained that he “does not need the help” of the African Union if he does not change his approach.

Sudan’s membership of the African Union was suspended after the 2021 coup.