Fighting continued in Khartoum on Monday evening despite the theoretical implementation of a week-long ceasefire agreement between the army and paramilitaries, supposedly allowing civilians and humanitarian aid to cross the border. Sudan.

Since April 15, the war between the armed forces of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Force (RSF) of General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo has claimed the lives of at least a thousand people and has resulted in the displacement and displacement of more than a million others.

Usually fighting fades at night. But last night, after the peace deal went into effect, at 10:45 p.m. (Greek time), residents of the northeastern suburb of Khartoum told AFP that clashes were continuing.

And residents of the southern part of the Sudanese capital said they “heard airstrikes after the established ceasefire time.”

For the 37th consecutive 24 hours, Khartoum’s five million residents are facing another day of fighting in sweltering heat, most without running water, electricity or telecommunications.

Last night, the UN recorded “fighting and troop movements, while both sides pledged not to seek advantage until a ceasefire is in place.”

“Everyone is suffering, we have no water”

After two weeks of talks, US and Saudi mediators said they reached an agreement between the rivals that included a one-week ceasefire to reopen essential services such as hospitals, replenish aid depots and looted or bombed markets.

The two camps have given assurances that they intend to abide by it. In Khartoum, however, residents say they see no sign that places are preparing for it.

“We don’t see any sign that DTY, who still own the roads, is preparing to abandon them,” Mahmoud Salahuddin, a resident of the Sudanese capital, said yesterday.

Although the military dominates the airwaves, they have few forces in the capital while the DTY holds most of Khartoum. Residents accuse the paramilitaries of ransacking their homes or setting up command centers there.

In this East African country, one of the poorest on the planet, 10 ceasefire agreements have been announced and remain unfilled.

However, resident Khaled Saleh wants to hope.

“If there is a ceasefire, the water can return and I can finally see a doctor about my diabetes and high blood pressure,” he said.

Othman al-Zein, a trader from Darfur, a region of western Sudan that has suffered the most from the war, like the capital, hopes for his part that he can find an escape route.

“If there is a ceasefire everywhere in Sudan, although I doubt it, I will leave Nyala,” he explained, “in South Sudan to find shelter and save my savings.”

How, in addition to stray fire, many Sudanese are most afraid of robberies.

According to the UN, 25 of the country’s 45 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, food is becoming scarce, banks are closed, and most agri-food facilities – factories, shops, warehouses – have either been destroyed or looted.

“We are all hungry, children and old people, everyone is suffering from the war. We have no water,” sums up a resident of the capital Swad al-Fateh. “The two camps must come to a real agreement.”

“Surveillance Mechanism”?

Frightened and hungry, thousands of Sudanese and refugees in Sudan try to flee the country every day. Their number in Chad is “growing rapidly” and now stands at about 90,000, up from 76,000 three days earlier, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said yesterday. If the armed conflict continues, at least a million more Sudanese could flee to neighboring states that are worried about the risk of war spreading.

Doctors continue to sound the alarm about the dramatic state of the health system: in Khartoum, as in Darfur, almost everything is out of order. Some were not bombed, but nothing remained of them, or they were captured by the warring parties.

The UN and humanitarian organizations are calling for the creation of safe corridors, and this time Riyadh and Washington are assuring that a “ceasefire monitoring mechanism” will be created with the participation of representatives of the warring parties, the United States and Saudi Arabia.

At the Security Council in New York, the Sudanese ambassador to the UN, loyal to General Burhan, blamed the WDF for all but one of the atrocities recorded since April 15.

General Daglo responded to the army’s accusations in recorded statements uploaded to the Internet, promising to put an “end” to the “coup” and urging his men to continue to “fight until victory or martyrdom”.

UN Special Representative for Sudan Volker Perthes again admitted he was “overwhelmed” by the outbreak of war between the two generals, who were supposed to be discussing the resumption of the country’s transition to democracy.

In 2021, they staged a coup together, halting the transition to democracy that began after thirty years of the dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir.

The two men had a disagreement over the terms for integrating the DTY into the regular army.

On Friday, General Burkhan announced that he had removed General Daglo from his post as deputy commander of the military regime and replaced him with Malik Aggar. The latter, a former rebel leader who signed a 2020 peace deal with Khartoum, met on Monday with South Sudanese President Salva Kiir, a traditional mediator in Sudanese wars.

^{Source: APE-MEB, AFP.}