Nearly 100 civilians killed as Sudan fighting rages into third day
Khartoum, Apr 17 (EFE).- Nearly 100 civilians have died and hundreds others injured, according to the committee of the Sudan Doctors Union on Monday, as fighting between the Sudanese army and the powerful paramilitary Rapid Support Force (RSF) continued into the third day.
On Sunday, during the second day of fighting across the country, 41 civilians were killed in addition to the 56 fatalities on Saturday, mainly in the capital Khartoum, the independent committee said in a statement.
It put the total number of injured so far at 942, including both civilians and military.
The toll is expected to rise as it said its figure does not include casualties who could not reach hospitals due to difficulties with mobility and security.
RSF leader General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, has urged the international community to intervene against the forces of Sudan’s de facto president and commander-in-chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, whom he called a “radical Islamist who is bombing civilians from the air.”
“The international community must take action now and intervene against the crimes of Sudanese General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, a radical Islamist who is bombing civilians from the air,” Hemedti wrote on Twitter.
“His army is waging a brutal campaign against innocent people, bombing them with MiGs,” he said.
Hemedti warned the RSF “will continue to pursue al-Burhan and bring him to justice,” justifying the fighting that broke out over the weekend as “merely a response to the siege and assault against our forces.”
A three-hour humanitarian ceasefire agreed on by the warring sides was violated on Sunday, something that “extremely disappointed” the United Nations’ special representative in Sudan, Volker Perthes, who went on to “urge all parties to respect their international obligations, including to ensure the protection of all civilians.”
Humanitarian corridors opened during the brief pause in fighting in the main urban centers of Sudan, especially in Khartoum, but fierce clashes continued further away from residential areas.
More than 1,000 people were evacuated from the capital, while some 450 boys and girls were able to leave a school they were trapped in since the clashes broke out, sources from the Sudanese Red Crescent told Efe.
Britain and the United States have called for an “immediate cessation of violence” and “a return to the talks” in Sudan.
“There is a shared deep concern about the fighting, the violence that’s going on in Sudan; the threat that poses to civilians, that it poses to the Sudanese nation, and potentially poses even to the region,” US secretary of state Antony Blinken said in a joint statement with his British opposite number James Cleverly.
“The immediate future lies in the hands of the generals who are engaged in this fight, and we call upon them to put peace first, to bring an end to the fighting, to get back to negotiations,” Cleverly stressed.
Sudan on Monday entered the third consecutive day of clashes, which continue to rage in the capital Khartoum and other regions in the north and west of the country.
The army reported late on Sunday that the general situation is ‘very stable’ and that there were only ‘limited clashes’ with the RSF, mainly in the capital.
The Armed Forces claim that they control most of the military installations and vital infrastructure in Khartoum and that they have seized the strategic Merowe airport in northern Sudan from the RSF, as well as large areas of the conflict area of Kordofan, in addition to other regions.
The fighting is part of a power struggle between two factions of the country’s military leadership who disagree over how they should transition back to civilian rule, after a 2019 coup ousted dictator Omar al-Bashir. EFE
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