Sudan crisis: UN warned Sudan is on “brink of collapse” after deadly violence.
Khartoum:
Sudan’s warring generals have agreed to a three-day ceasefire, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Monday.
Previous attempts to pause the conflict fell through, but Blinken announced: “Following intense negotiations over the past 48 hours, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have agreed to a nationwide ceasefire. fires to be put in place at midnight on April 24 will take 72 hours.”
Blinken’s statement came two hours before the armistice was to take effect.
It came after the UN chief warned that Sudan is on “the brink of collapse” after fighting between the rivals has seen unprecedented battles in the capital, Khartoum, as well as elsewhere in the country.
The forces loyal to army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan are fighting those of his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who commands the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
The RSF grew out of the Janjaweed militia that then-President Omar al-Bashir unleashed in Darfur, leading to allegations of war crimes against Bashir and others.
At least 427 people have been killed and more than 3,700 injured, according to UN agencies.
One of the latest to die was the assistant administrative attaché at Cairo’s embassy in Khartoum, Egypt’s foreign ministry said. The official was killed while going from home to the embassy to follow evacuation procedures, it said.
More than 4,000 people have fled the country in foreign-organized evacuations that began Saturday.
The United States and several European, Middle Eastern, African and Asian countries launched emergency missions to bring their embassy staff and Sudanese citizens to safety by road, air and sea.
But millions of Sudanese cannot flee.
They are trying to survive acute shortages of water, food, medicine and fuel, as well as power and internet outages.
UN agencies reported that some Sudanese civilians were able to escape “combat-affected areas, including to Chad, Egypt and South Sudan”.
“The morgues are full. The streets are full of corpses,” said Attiya Abdallah, head of the doctors’ union, who reported on Monday that there were more victims after locations in southern Khartoum were “heavy shelled”.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that violence in Sudan – already one of the world’s poorest countries, with a history of military coups – could “engulf the entire region and beyond”.
“We must all do everything in our power to pull Sudan back from the brink,” Guterres said.
He had also called again for a ceasefire.
Britain requested an emergency UN Security Council meeting on Sudan, which a diplomat said would take place on Tuesday.
A UN convoy with 700 people on board made an arduous 850 kilometers (530 mi) road trip to Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast from the capital, leaving behind gunfire and explosions.
UN mission chief Volker Perthes said the convoy had arrived safely.
“Thirty-five hours in a not-so-comfortable convoy is certainly better than three hours of bombing and being covered in shells,” he said.
A UN statement separately said that he and other key personnel “will remain in Sudan and continue to work towards a solution to the current crisis”.
– ‘Unspeakable Destruction’ –
With Khartoum airport shut down after battles that left charred planes on the tarmac, many foreigners were airlifted from smaller airstrips to countries like Djibouti and Jordan.
US special forces swooped in on Chinook helicopters on Sunday to rescue diplomats and their families, while Britain launched a similar rescue mission.
European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said more than 1,000 EU citizens had been deported during a “long and intense weekend” of airlift missions by France, Germany and others.
China said on Monday it had “safely evacuated” an initial group of citizens and would “use all means to protect the lives, property and safety of more than 1,500 Chinese compatriots in Sudan.”
The capital, a city of five million, has endured “more than a week of unspeakable destruction,” Norwegian ambassador Endre Stiansen wrote on Twitter after his evacuation.
Analysts’ International Crisis Group warned that the fighting “risks rapidly plunging the country into a full-scale war that entangles numerous armed groups.”
An evacuee, a Lebanese man, told AFPTV on his arrival by bus in Port Sudan that he left alone “with this T-shirt and these pajamas, everything I have with me after 17 years”.
Those Sudanese who can afford it also flee Khartoum in overcrowded buses on the more than 900-kilometer desert drive north to Egypt.
Of the 800,000 South Sudanese refugees who previously fled civil war in their own country, some are choosing to return, with women and children crossing the border, the UN refugee agency said.
– ‘Anxiety and Exhaustion’ –
In the capital, street fighting has often blackened the sky with smoke from shelled buildings and burned shops.
“There was a missile strike in our neighborhood… It’s like nowhere is safe,” said resident Tagreed Abdin, an architect.
Experts have long established links between the RSF and the Russian mercenary group Wagner. Earlier on Monday, Blinken expressed “deep concern” that Wagner risked exacerbating the war in Sudan.
The army overthrew Bashir in April 2019 following massive civil protests that raised hopes for a transition to democracy.
The two generals seized power in a 2021 coup, but later fell out, most recently over the planned integration of the RSF into the regular army.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NewsMadura staff and is being published from a syndicated feed.)
