Daily Times

One month since Sudan’s conflict erupted, its capital is a desolate war zone where terrorised families huddle in their homes as gun battles rage in the dusty, deserted streets outside. As people hope to dodge stray bullets, they also endure desperate shortages of food and basic supplies, power blackouts, communications outages and runaway inflation. Khartoum, a city of five million, was long a place of relative stability and wealth, even under decades of sanctions against former strongman Omar al-Bashir. Now it has become a shell of its former self. Charred aircraft lie on the airport tarmac, foreign embassies are shuttered and hospitals, banks, shops and wheat silos have been ransacked by looters. Fighting continued Monday morning, with loud explosions heard across Khartoum and thick smoke billowing in the sky while warplanes flying overhead drew anti-aircraft fire, according to witnesses.

“The situation is becoming worse by the day,” said a 37-year-old resident of southern Khartoum who did not wish to be named. “People are getting more and more scared because the two sides… are becoming more and more violent.” The fighting broke out on April 15 between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who leads the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

While the generals fight, what remains of the government has retreated to Port Sudan about 850 kilometres (500 miles) away, the hub for mass evacuations of both Sudanese and foreign citizens. The battles have killed more than 750 people, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, with thousands more wounded and nearly a million displaced. Multiple truce deals have been violated, and hopes are dim for an end to the fighting. Both sides “break ceasefires with a regularity that demonstrates a sense of impunity unprecedented even by Sudan’s standards of civil conflict,” said Alex Rondos, the European Union’s former special representative to the Horn of Africa.