CAIRO, Egypt
Sudanese families were massing
Wednesday at a border crossing with Egypt and at a port city on the Red Sea,
desperately trying to escape their country’s violence and sometimes waiting for
days with little food or shelter, witnesses said.British Nationals seen here boarding an RAF aircraft in Akrotiri, Cyprus, after being evacuated from Sudan.
In the capital, Khartoum, the
intensity of fighting eased on the second day of a three-day truce, and the
military said it had “initially accepted” a diplomatic initiative to extend the
current cease-fire for another three days after it expires Thursday.
The initiative, brokered by
the eight-nation East Africa trade bloc known as the Intergovernmental
Authority on Development, or IGAD, would also include direct negotiations
between the military and the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group it
has been battling since Apr. 15.
There was no immediate comment
from the RSF on the initiative, which, if accepted by both sides, would mark a
major breakthrough in more than a week of intense international diplomacy. The
two rivals, army
chief Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan and RSF commander Gen.
Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, have until now seemed determined to vanquish the
other.
Taking advantage of relative
calm, many residents in Khartoum and the neighboring city of Omdurman emerged
from their homes to seek food and water, lining up at bakeries or grocery
stores, after days of being trapped inside by the fighting between the army and
a rival paramilitary group. Some inspected shops or homes that had been
destroyed or looted.
“There is a sense of calm in
my area and neighborhoods,” said Mahasen Ali, a tea vendor who lives in
Khartoum’s southern neighborhood of May. “But all are afraid of what’s next.”
Still, gunfire and explosions
could be heard in the city, though residents said clashes were in more limited
pockets, mainly around the military’s headquarters and the Republican Palace in
central Khartoum and around bases in Omdurman across the Nile River.
With the future of any truce
uncertain, many took the opportunity to join the tens of thousands who have
streamed out of the capital in recent days, trying to get out of the crossfire
between the forces of Sudan’s two top generals.
Food has grown more difficult
to obtain, and electricity is cut off across much of the capital and other
cities. Multiple aid agencies have had to suspend operations, a heavy blow in a
country where a third of the population of 46 million relies on humanitarian
assistance.
The U.N. Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said only one in four hospitals in the
capital is fully functional, and that the fighting has disrupted assistance to
50,000 children who are acutely malnourished.A British military transport aircraft with approximately 79 British nationals aboard lands in Larnaca main airport, Cyprus, on Wednesday, April 26, 2023. Cyprus said it would offer its facilities to assist in the evacuation of British nationals from war-wracked Sudan, acting as a waystation until evacuees are repatriated.
Many Sudanese fear the two
sides will escalate
their battle once the international evacuations of foreigners that began Sunday
is completed. The British government, whose airlift is one of the last
still ongoing, said it has evacuated around 300 people on flights out and plans
four more Wednesday, promising to keep going as long as possible.
Large numbers of people have
meanwhile been making the exhausting daylong drive across the desert to access
points out of the country — to the city of Port Sudan on the eastern Red Sea
coast and to the Arqin crossing into Egypt at the northern border.
Crowds of Sudanese and
foreigners also waited in Port Sudan, trying to register for a ferry to Saudi
Arabia. Dallia Abdelmoniem, a Sudanese political commentator, said she and her
family arrived Monday and have been trying to get a spot. “Priority was given
to foreign nationals,” she told The Associated Press.
She and some of her extended
family, mostly women and children, took a 26-hour bus journey to reach the
port, during which they passed military checkpoints and small villages where
people offered cold hibiscus juice and water to “Khartoum travelers.”
“These folk have very little,
but they offered every single passenger on all these buses and trucks something
to make their journey better,” she said.
At the Arqin crossing,
families have been spending their nights outside in the desert, waiting to be
let in to Egypt. Buses were lining up at the crossing.
“It’s a mess — long lines of
elderly people, patients, women and children waiting in miserable conditions,”
said Moaz al-Ser, a Sudanese teacher who arrived along with his wife and three
children at the border a day earlier.
Tens of thousands of Khartoum
residents have also fled to neighboring provinces or even into already existing
displacement and refugee camps within Sudan that house victims of past
conflicts.A man walks by a house hit in recent fighting in Khartoum, Sudan, Tuesday, April 25, 2023.
At least 512 people, including
civilians and combatants, have been killed since
the fighting erupted on Apr. 15, with another 4,200 wounded, the
Sudanese Health Ministry said. The Doctors’ Syndicate, which tracks civilian
casualties, said at least 295 civilians have been killed and 1,790 wounded.
The 72-hour cease-fire
announced by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was to last until late
Thursday. Many fear that fighting will only escalate once evacuations of
foreigners, which appeared to be in their last stages, are completed.
But a senior British military
officer said the U.K. evacuation operation could continue regardless of the
cease-fire. Brig. Dan Reeve said conditions at the Wadi Saeedna airfield near
Khartoum are “calm” and that the Sudanese armed forces have “good control” of
the surrounding area.
Cyprus’ Foreign Minister
Constantinos Kombos said five flights from Sudan arrived Wednesday, with a
total of 391 British nationals aboard.
A series of short cease-fires
over the past week have either failed outright or brought only intermittent
lulls that allowed evacuations of hundreds of foreigners by air and land.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio
Guterres warned that the conflict is not only putting Sudan’s future at risk,
“it is lighting a fuse that could detonate across borders, causing immense
suffering for years, and setting development back by decades.”
Guterres cited reports of
armed clashes across the country, with people fleeing their homes in Blue Nile
and North Kordofan states and across Western Darfur as well. Joyce Msuya, the
assistant secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, told the Security Council
“there have been numerous reports of sexual and gender-based violence.”
Msuya said the U.N. has
received reports “of tens of thousands of people arriving in the Central
African Republic, Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, and South Sudan.”
In a separate development, Dr.
Mike Ryan, emergencies chief at the World Health Organization, appeared to walk
back concerns
expressed a day earlier by the WHO representative in Sudan over fighters taking
over a laboratory where pathogens are stored, including polio, measles
and cholera. Speaking to reporters in Geneva, Ryan said the main risk of
exposure was to the fighters themselves.
Burhan and Dagalo rose to
power after a popular uprising in 2019 prompted the generals to remove Sudan’s
longtime autocratic ruler Omar al-Bashir. Sudanese since have been trying to
bring a transition to democratic rule, but in 2021 Burhan and Dagalo joined
forces in a coup that purged civilian leaders. They fell out this month over a
new rough plan to re-introduce civilian rule.
Both the military and the RSF
have a long history of brutalizing activists and protesters as well as other
rights abuses.
Also on Wednesday, the
military said al-Bashir was being held in a military-run hospital, giving its
first official statement on his location since the fighting erupted. An attack
on the prison where al-Bashir and many of his former officials had been held raised
questions over his whereabouts.
In a statement, the military
said al-Bashir and other former officials had been moved to the military-run
Aliyaa hospital before clashes broke out across the country. Al-Bashir is
wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide, crimes
against humanity and war crimes related to the Darfur conflict in the 2000s.
