Renewed artillery exchanges rocked greater Khartoum early Wednesday as Sudan’s warring generals resumed fighting just minutes after the latest US and Saudi-brokered ceasefire expired.
Already on Tuesday evening, an immense fire had engulfed the intelligence service’s headquarters in the capital Khartoum with each side accusing the other of attacking it in violation of the 72-hour truce.
A source within the regular army, led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, accused rival paramilitaries loyal to his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo of shelling the building.
A source within the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces said an “army drone bombed the building where RSF fighters had gathered, sparking a fire and the partial destruction of the intelligence headquarters”.
front of an armoured vehicle. A dead man was partially curled up outside a house. Several others appeared to be lying face down together on a dirt road.
Residents have fled en masse, grabbing whatever they could to escape to the border with Chad. At least 150,000 people have fled Darfur into Chad since the start of the fighting, according to the UN.
Some described being shot at by fighters and subject to searches during the perilous journey.
The United Nations has spoken of possible “crimes against humanity” in Darfur as the conflict has “taken an ethnic dimension” in a region still reeling from a 2003 rebellion among non-Arab minorities that prompted then-strongman Omar al-Bashir to recruit the Arab Janjaweed militia, whose actions led to charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Washington has said the RSF, which traces its origins to the Janjaweed, is “primarily” responsible for recent “atrocities” in Darfur, which is home to a quarter of Sudan’s population.
In an audio recording Tuesday, Daglo denounced what he called “a tribal conflict” in El Geneina, claiming to have ordered his men “not to intervene” and accusing the army of “creating sedition by distributing weapons” to civilians.
