In Sudan, fighting continues and aid still does not arrive

(Marwan Ali/AP)

Fighting raged again on Tuesday in Sudan, despite the extension of the truce decided the day before to try to deliver vital humanitarian aid to this country on the verge of famine.

At war since April 15, the army of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane and the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo agreed on Monday evening to extend a ceasefire in force by five days. since May 22. But on the ground, air raids, artillery fire and armored movements never ceased.

Fighting continued Tuesday in Khartoum, the capital, and in Darfur, a vast region in the west of the country, bordering Chad, residents told AFP. “Looting has become commonplace in Khartoum, with neighborhoods completely raked,” says a humanitarian from the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).

“There is no ceasefire in Sudan,” said researcher Rashid Abdi of the Rift Valley Institute. “There is a huge gap between the reality on the ground in Sudan and the diplomacy in Jeddah”, in Saudi Arabia, where the American and Saudi mediators negotiated the truce with the emissaries of the two camps, he wrote on Twitter.

An already heavy toll

The war has already claimed more than 1,800 lives, according to the NGO ACLED, and nearly a million and a half displaced persons and refugees, according to the UN.

Sudan was already before the war one of the poorest countries in the world. One in three residents suffered from hunger, long power cuts were a daily occurrence and the health system was on the verge of collapse. Three-quarters of the hospitals in the combat zones are now out of order, and the others have almost no equipment or medicines left.

After nearly seven weeks of war, 25 million of the 45 million Sudanese need humanitarian aid to survive, according to the UN. Among them, more than 13.6 million children, underlines UNICEF, including “620,000 in a state of acute malnutrition, half of whom could die if they are not helped in time”.

So far, aid workers have only been able to deliver small quantities of food or medicine, as their workers cannot travel and their shipments are blocked at customs.

“The food aid distributed weeks ago was only enough for a few days” in Madani, a town south of Khartoum that hosts the capital’s displaced, said Ahmed Omer of the NRC, describing those who “sleep on the ground , sick children, pregnant women and the elderly in need of vital care”.

In Darfur, some regions are cut off from the world, without electricity, Internet and telephone.

Towards “a total civil war”?

Many Sudanese now fear “an all-out civil war”, according to the Forces of Freedom and Change (FLC), the civil bloc ousted from power during the putsch led in 2021 by the two generals, then allies and now at war. .

In Darfur, already ravaged in the 2000s by a deadly war, local militias, tribal fighters and armed civilians have joined the fighting. Governor Minni Minnawi, a former rebel leader now close to the army, also called on the population on Sunday to take up arms “to protect their property”.

“We have to arm ourselves, because everyone is in danger,” said Aboubaker Ismaïl, a resident of the region, speaking of attacks against civilians and looting. But, retorts Mohammed Hassan, a resident of Nyala, the capital of South Darfur, calling on civilians to arm themselves is “totally irresponsible: it is a very dangerous call that can lead us to civil war”.

Chad, South Sudan or Ethiopia, neighboring states themselves in the grip of violence, fear contagion and are calling for aid from the UN, which in return repeats having received only a tiny share of the funds from its donors. And, in a few days, the rainy season will begin, and with it the fear of epidemics of malaria or cholera.