Fighting raged on Tuesday in Khartoum between paramilitaries threatening to take the city and the army which is now calling on all young people in Sudan to join the flag on the eve of Eid al-Adha. General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo’s Rapid Support Forces also announced the release of “100 prisoners of war” on the occasion of this important Muslim holiday.
Fighting raged in Sudan on the eve of Eid al-Adha. The paramilitaries threatened on Tuesday, June 27, to take Khartoum and the army is now calling on all young people in Sudan to enlist in the flag.
In the capital, the fighting between the army, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo is now concentrated around military bases.
The FSR are, since the beginning of the war on April 15, present en masse in the residential areas where they had established their bases for a long time. The army tries to play its main asset: the air, which it controls alone, without its infantry managing to gain a foothold in the huge city crossed by two arms of the Nile.
For several days, the FSR have been trying to take the last army bases in the capital where millions of inhabitants are still hiding – nearly a million and a half have left, fleeing stray bullets and water and water cuts. of electricity in the scorching heat.
The RSF took over the police headquarters and its huge arsenal in southern Khartoum and on Tuesday harassed the army at bases in central, northern and southern Khartoum, residents told AFP . If they take these last bases, they will have taken control of Khartoum, assure the experts.
Under fire, Mawaheb Omar, holed up in her home with her four children, tells AFP of an Eid celebration that promises to be “miserable and tasteless: we can’t even buy mutton”. Eid al-Adha is the biggest holiday in the Muslim calendar, during which the faithful must sacrifice an animal in memory of Abraham who, according to tradition, had immolated a sheep in extremis in place of his son Ismail. .
Release of “100 prisoners of war”
On the occasion of Eid, the two warring generals split a message to the nation. General Burhane to call on state television “all the young people of the country and all those who can defend it not to hesitate to do so (…) or to join the military units”.
And General Daglo to respond in a voice recording posted online to accusations of UN “crimes against humanity” and “ethnic” war in Darfur, where his former militiamen are accused of atrocities in the bloody war launched in 2003.
Tuesday, again, the Troika for Sudan – Norway, the United States and Great Britain – denounced “violations of human rights, sexual violence and violence with an ethnic dimension, attributed globally to the FSR and their allied militias”. The boss of the paramilitaries promised “rapid and strict actions” against his men who carried out such abuses, while the FSR claim to have started to judge certain “undisciplined” members.
The paramilitaries also announced the release of “100 (soldiers) prisoners of war”. Since the beginning of the conflict, the two camps have exchanged hostages several times via the Red Cross without ever specifying the number of prisoners they still hold.
General Daglo, himself from an Arab tribe in Darfur, called for “avoiding plunging into civil war” this gold-rich region where more than a quarter of Sudanese live. General Burhane, he denounced there, like many inhabitants of non-Arab ethnic groups, a “genocide” of the FSR.
The army must face new fronts
In difficulty in Khartoum, the army must face new fronts: a rebel group is now attacking it in Kordofan, south of Khartoum, and in the Blue Nile, bordering Ethiopia.
The UN mission in Sudan, which withdrew almost all of its personnel from the country at the start of the war, said it was “very concerned” about the violence in Kurmuk, a locality in the Blue Nile, from where ” hundreds of civilians fled to Ethiopia”.
In all, more than two million people have been displaced in Sudan since April 15, while another 600,000 have fled the country, mainly to Egypt in the north and Chad in the west.
The UN and humanitarians say they lack funds and warn: the rainy season, from June to September, greatly jeopardizes their ability to act while 25 million people need humanitarian aid to survive.
And with the rains come epidemics of malaria, cholera and dengue fever.
With AFP
Source: France 24
