Sudan’s army and a rival paramilitary group are facing mounting international pressure to end a conflict that has claimed hundreds of lives since it erupted last weekend.
(Bloomberg) — Sudan’s army and a rival paramilitary group are facing mounting international pressure to end a conflict that has claimed hundreds of lives since it erupted last weekend.
The African Union and representatives from a number of other organizations and governments, including the US, China, UK and Russia, issued a joint statement late Thursday condemning the violence and calling for an immediate cease-fire, effective from midnight. The plea went unheeded, with several residents reporting heavy fire in Khartoum, the capital, and the city of Omdurman on Friday.
The fighting between the military, which is headed by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo has killed at least 330 people and left almost 3,200 others wounded, according to the World Health Organization. With parts of the north African country rendered a no-fly zone and supplies of water, fuel and other essentials in increasingly short supply, foreign governments are struggling to evacuate their citizens.
Burhan has spoken to a number of global leaders, including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who all emphasized the need for the situation to return to normal, the army said in a statement on its Facebook page.
“Our country has suffered serious injury, where the killed and the wounded have fallen, families have been displaced, and homes destroyed,” Burhan said in a video address on Friday. “We are confident that we will overcome this ordeal.”
Some of the worst violence has taken place in al-Fasher in the western Darfur region, according to Cyrus Paye, project coordinator for Doctors Without Borders. He said he‘d seen 279 people who’d sustained wounds since the fighting began on April 15 and 44 of them had died.
“The situation is catastrophic,” he said. “The majority of the wounded are civilians who were hit by stray bullets, and many of them are children. They have fractures caused by bullets, or they have gunshot wounds or shrapnel in their legs, their abdomen or their chest.”
There has also been intense fighting in Khartoum, with many people trapped in the vicinity of the army headquarters and presidential palace and running out of food and water.
Thousands of people have fled the fighting into neighboring Chad, according to the UN.
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