KHARTOUM: Fighting raged in the Sudanese capital, the eve of the Eid al-Adha Muslim holiday, after paramilitaries seized Khartoum’s main police base.
Fighting in the city between the army led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo is now concentrated around military bases.
At the same time in Sudan’s west, the conflict is worsening to “alarming levels” in Darfur, the United Nations warned.
Since the war erupted on April 15, the RSF has established bases in residential neighbourhoods of the capital while the army has struggled to gain a foothold on the ground despite its air superiority.
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Late Sunday, the RSF said it had seized the headquarters, on Khartoum’s southern edge, of the paramilitary Central Reserve police, sanctioned last year by Washington for rights abuses.
On Tuesday the RSF attacked army bases in central, northern and southern Khartoum, witnesses said.
The United States, Norway and Britain, known as the Troika, on Tuesday condemned “widespread human rights violations, conflict-related sexual violence, and targeted ethnic violence in Darfur, mostly attributed to soldiers of the Rapid Support Forces and allied militias”.
RSF are descended from Janjaweed militia unleashed by Khartoum in response to a rebel uprising in Darfur in 2003, leading to war crimes charges.
In the current fighting the RSF has been accused of looting humanitarian supplies, factories and houses abandoned by those displaced by the fighting or taken by force.
The RSF had said Monday evening that it was beginning to try some of its “undisciplined” members, and announced the release of “100 prisoners of war” from the army.
Since the beginning of the conflict, both sides have regularly announced prisoner swaps through the Red Cross, without ever giving the exact number of those captured.
Daglo, a former Darfur militia chief, also warned against “plunging into civil war”.
This adds to the ever-increasing number, now almost 645,000 people, who have fled to neighbouring countries, mostly Egypt and Chad, according to the latest International Organization for Migration data. Around 2.2 million people have been displaced within Sudan, the agency said.
A record 25 million people in Sudan need humanitarian aid and protection, the UN says.
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