What happens in Sudan 3 months after the start of the conflict?

War violence threatens to deepen in Darfur, a region in the west of the African country marked by decades of instability, after the assassination of a governor.

The conflict in Sudan reached its third month on Thursday; at a time when they surpassed themselves the 2,000 dead2.2 million people fled their homes one day after the assassination of a governor in the Darfur region.

Since April 15, when fighting broke out between the Sudanese Army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group, the warfare spread rapidly not only in the cities of Khartoum (the capital of the country), Omdurman and Bahri, but also to western Darfur, which decades of instability.

In Darfur, the Sudanese Armed Forces have accused their rivals of kidnapping and murdering Khamis Abdallah Abbakar, the governor of West Darfur state, hours after he gave a television interview blaming the RSF for a recent escalation of violence in area. For its part, the United Nations said, quoted by AFP, that “convincing eyewitness accounts attribute this act to the Arab militias and the RSF.”

Along these lines, the UN aid chief, Martin Griffiths, warned that the situation in Darfur is “quickly becoming a humanitarian calamity“. “The world cannot allow this to happen. Not again,” he added, referring to the 17-year civil war that devastated the region and came to an end in 2020 after a precarious peace deal.

endless conflict

Meanwhile, according to a report from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) to which the French agency had access, in the months of April and May there were records of at least 2,000 deaths as a result of the conflict. The Khartoum region is the one with the most acts of violence, while Darfur registers the highest number of deaths.

For its part, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), in the last report on the African country corresponding to June, has reported more than 2 million displacements, which include more than one and a half million internal migrations and more than half a million to neighboring countries.

Everything in “our life has changed,” Mohamad al Hassan, one of the more than a million displaced people who fled Khartoum, told AFP. “We don’t know if we will return home or if we need to start a new life,” he said, adding that he did not expect “this war to go on for so long.”

• Prior to the start of the armed violence, the conflict between the two parties intensified as a result of a series of disagreements regarding security issues and military reform.
• The tensions between the Army and the RSF made it necessary to delay the signing of an agreement with the political parties to reactivate the country’s democratic transition, which has the support of the international community.
• He overthrow in 2019 of the government of the president Omar al Bashir is at the origin of the conflict. Under his command, the paramilitary force grew out of former militias known as the Janjaweed, which carried out a brutal crackdown in the Darfur area during decades of conflict.