Yet another flop of the “truce” declared for 72 hours in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, hostage for 12 days in the conflict between the regular army and the paramilitaries of the Rapid support forces. The ceasefire should have started at midnight on April 24 and lasted until the 26th, but it took just a few hours for fighting to re-emerge in the city and in the rest of the country. In a statement released via Twitter, the paramilitaries accuse the regular armed forces of having attacked the Rapid Support Forces camp in the Kafouri area “with aircraft and artillery”, violating the agreement signed a few days earlier.
Now the army opens to an extension of another 24 hours, while the international community tries to increase the pressure for a diplomatic resolution of hostilities. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has discussed with the president of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki, to arrive at a “sustainable end” to the violence that erupted on 15 April. In the previous days, proposals for mediation had emerged from Turkey and Israel, with the hypothesis of hosting direct negotiations abroad. According to the latest data available, the clashes caused 512 victims and 4,200 injured, exacerbating the crisis in a country where almost 16 of the 46 million citizens were already requesting humanitarian assistance at the beginning of 2023.
Conflict expands, pressure on borders grows
The conflict arises from the differences between the army general and de facto leader of Sudan al-Buharan and his former deputy Dagalo, known as “Hemetti”, at the head of the more than 100,000 men deployed by the paramilitary forces of the RSF. The tensions between the two, architects of the 2021 coup to the detriment of Sudan’s “democratic transition”, have resulted in a clash that has lasted for almost two weeks and is likely to expand beyond the borders of the Sudanese capital.
The most heated clashes of April 26 took place in Omdurman, a city of 1.5 million citizens just north of Khartoum, where reporters from Reuters they speak of clashes between army troops and RSF reinforcements from other parts of the country. Fears of degeneration into a full-fledged civil war are also growing, after some witnesses told of civilians armed by the police against the paramilitaries in the city of Genina and of some Arab tribes ready, instead, to side with the RSF.
Meanwhile, the immediate evacuation of international diplomats and civilians has left the Sudanese population even more isolated, among millions of citizens stranded in Khartoum and a growing number of migrants ready to move towards neighboring countries. The United Nations estimates that around 100,000 people could attempt to enter neighboring Chad, the country which already hosts 400,000 Sudanese asylum seekers, while another 170,000 would be heading to (or returning to) South Sudan, the state born in 2011 as a sub-Saharan division from Khartoum. There are also movements towards Egypt, a country which has already shown more or less open support for al-Burhan’s army.