Thousands of civilians fled the bombardment of Sudan’s capital on Wednesday, where more than 270 civilians were killed in five days of fighting between the paramilitary Rapid Support Force (RSF) and the regular army, AFP reported.

On foot or in cars, on roads littered with corpses and burnt armored vehicles, thousands of Sudanese struggle to make their way through the crossfire between the RSF of General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, known as “Hemedti”, and the army led by General Abdel Fattah al. -Burhane, who has ruled since their joint coup in 2021.

“Life in Khartoum is impossible,” Alawya al-Tayeb, 33, told AFP as he headed south. “I did everything to keep my children from seeing the bodies” because they are “already traumatized.”

“We are going to stay with relatives in Wad Madan,” said Mohammed Saleh, a 43-year-old civil servant. Now, when the military and paramilitary groups roam the streets, “we are afraid that our houses will be attacked.”

Although fighting is taking place mainly in Khartoum and Darfur (in the west), the two warring generals have turned a deaf ear to calls for a ceasefire.

As on Tuesday, RSF announced a “24-hour ceasefire” from 16:00 GMT, but few believe it.

The capital, with a population of more than five million, has no electricity or running water, and stray bullets regularly pierce a wall or window. Sometimes a bomb from the sky turns a building or hospital into a pile of rubble.

More than 270 civilians have been killed since Saturday, 15 Western embassies said in a statement, warning that the death toll was only “preliminary”. On Monday evening, the UN announced the death toll at nearly 200.

They also called on both sides “not to illegally evacuate people from their homes, not to damage civilian infrastructure, not to allow essential food and emergency aid for the wounded and sick.”

On Wednesday, the military said it had fought the RSF around one of the Central Bank branches and that “astronomical amounts of money were stolen.”