Update: Sudan crisis escalates as civilians suffer heavy tolls
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Over 180 people have been killed and more than 1,800 injured as the fighting within Sudan’s security forces continued in several densely populated cities for the third day. The figures were announced in a press conference given by Volker Perthes, United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Sudan on Monday, April 17.
The highest number of deaths have been reported in the capital Khartoum city where Sudan’s powerful paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) is trying to capture key areas and infrastructure from the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).
Led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, aka Hemeti, the deputy chairman of the military junta ruling since the coup in October 2021, the RSF is battling the army for the Presidential Palace, the HQ of SAF, the airport, as well as other key areas in the capital.
The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by the junta’s chairman and army chief, Abdel Fattah al Burhan, is fighting back and has in turn launched its own offensive on bases of the paramilitary in Khartoum and other cities. Both sides have made competing claims about controlling key infrastructures.
“According to the information I have been able to gather from several sources, the RSF had taken over most of SAF’s general command by Sunday. But the airforce tilted the balance,” said Abdul (name changed), whose NGO had been conducting workshops to promote some form of an agreement to avert this war in its run-up.
“The SAF forced the RSF out on Monday with airstrikes on its own HQ for two days,” he told Peoples Dispatch. “The RSF has now moved to the northeast of the HQ in the Burri neighborhood, which had seen massive protests during the December Revolution.” He was referring to the pro-democracy demonstrations that began in December 2018 and overthrew former dictator Omar al Bashir on April 11, 2019.
READ MORE: SUDAN CRISIS: EXPLAINER
Against the backdrop of Revolution and Counter-Revolution
The December Revolution’s forces have since been in a struggle to wrest power from army-chief Burhan and RSF head Hemeti, two close confidants of Bashir who had formed a military junta the very next day, with the former as its chairman and the latter as his deputy. When the mass sit-in demonstration occupying the square outside SAF’s HQ continued calling on the military junta to hand over power to civil authority, the RSF cleared it, and committed a massacre on June 3, 2019. Over 100 protesters were killed.
The junta led by the duo had shared power with some right-wing parties of the coalition called the Freedom and Change Forces (FFC) for a brief interregnum from August 2019 to October 2021, when all power was once again seized by the military with a coup.
Since then, however, the junta has been unable to govern the country rocked by perpetual protests. As calls from the militant pro-democracy movement, including the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP), for a complete overthrow of the junta grew louder, the junta also faced increasing international pressure. This led Burhan and Hemeti to once again begin talks with the right-wing parties, resulting in the Framework Agreement on December 5, 2022.
The finalization of the Political Agreement to govern with the FFC was postponed from April 1 to April 6, before it effectively fell apart in the build-up to this war which started on April 15. One of the key pending items for its conclusion was the question of the integration of the RSF into the SAF.
While RSF’s Hemeti demands a 10-year period for this integration, SAF’s Burhan insists on its completion within two years. Fearing Burhan’s intention to undercut FFC by bringing on board the Democratic Block coalition, which includes parties that had been in an alliance with ousted dictator Bashir’s Islamist party, the FFC appeared to be siding with the RSF, willing to cede to it another decade of autonomy.
Armed conflict between the SAF and the RSF has erupted in this context, marked by several contradictions within what the SCP calls the “counter-revolutionary camp” – i.e. the different components of the divided security forces as well as the different coalitions of right-wing parties competing with each other to share power with them.
SCP remarked that revolutionaries, who were earlier coming under fire when the army and the RSF together attacked their protests against the military rule and the right-wing parties’ attempts to legitimize it with a civilian partnership, are now caught in the crossfire between them.
Hospitals under attack
The RSF is launching attacks on SAF’s HQ from the positions they have taken in the Burri neighborhood, which was a site of many militant pro-democracy demonstrations and fierce crackdowns. “And the SAF is in turn shelling this densely populated area with tanks and artillery fire,” said Abdul.
Health workers have denounced that even hospitals and medical facilities have not been spared. “We have repeatedly appealed to the parties involved in the conflict not to attack health facilities…but what happened was exactly the opposite. Hospitals and health institutions in Khartoum and cities all over Sudan are being hit with heavy artillery and firearms,” Sudan Doctors Union (SDU) said in a statement on Monday.
The bombing of Al-Shaab Teaching Hospital in Khartoum has left it “completely out of service, leaving the medical staff, patients, children, and companions in an unsafe environment and in a state of confusion and fear.” Ibn Sina Specialist Hospital in the city has also suffered “severe damages”, SDU said, adding, “The Police Hospital was evacuated due to attacks and is now completely out of service.”
To the north of capital Khartoum, in the city of Khartoum Bahri, which has seen many civilian casualties, the Bashayer Hospital was shelled in an exchange between the army and the RSF. After a power outage in another one of the city’s hospitals, Al-Dowali Hospital, its fuel reserve to run electricity generators has fallen “dangerously low, which puts the lives of patients in intensive care and emergency surgeries in severe danger,” the doctors’ union warned.
Deaths have also been reported in Khartoum’s twin city of Omdurman. Abdul, who resides in an upper-middle-class neighborhood of this city, said with a sense of relief, “I can only hear intermittent firing today (on April 16).”
Dwindling supplies increases strain on civilian population
Abdul’s neighborhood, like many others across the three main cities of Khartoum state and elsewhere, has run out of water and electricity, making residents’ survival increasingly difficult by the day. “We’ve had no electricity since the grid was hit on Saturday. It is a matter of time before the stored food products in supermarkets start rotting,” Abdul said. Many fear a looming food shortage as fresh produce from rural areas cannot reach the city under bombardment.
“The water in the taps stopped soon after the fighting erupted on April 15. We managed on the reserves we had stored for three days, but now, we are only left with only three liters,” for a family including his wife, two children below the age of five, and aging parents, he said, adding, “The nearest store is out of water. I have to cross three streets to reach the next store, but I will risk exposing myself to fire on the way.”
“I am planning to take my family and leave from here for another safer neighborhood in the city. Not for electricity and water, but because my neighborhood is getting increasingly dangerous. The RSF is taking positions on one side and the SAF is on the other. The worst is yet to come. I want to get my family out of here before that,” he added.
The SAF’s stay-at-home warning has remained in place, as its fighter-planes swoop down to strike targets, and occasionally get shot out of the urban sky by anti-aircraft guns manned by the RSF which claims to be controlling all the entrances and exits to Khartoum state.
Several deaths and injuries have also been reported outside Khartoum, 400 km southwest of Sudan’s capital, in El-Obeid, capital of North Kordofan state, where “Al-Dhaman Hospital…was closed down after it was stormed by armed personnel,” according to the SDU.
Over 200 km to the north of Khartoum, fighting continues in the Northern state bordering Egypt for the control of the Merowe military airbase. It was RSF’s deployment to surround this airbase on April 12, amid simmering tensions with the army, that finally sparked off an armed confrontation on April 15.
Egyptian soldiers in Merowe airbase
Later that day, the RSF claimed control over this airbase and released a video showing some Egyptian soldiers it had captured from this base. One MiG-29 Fulcrum belonging to the Egyptian air force was destroyed in this base, while two others appear to have been damaged, according to The War Zone’s analysis of satellite imagery.
The RSF, which is backed by the UAE, said it had to take over the airport to prevent Egypt, which is supporting Burhan and his army, from using it to attack the RSF. The Egyptian armed forces said it is “in close coordination with the Sudanese authorities to ensure the safety of our troops during the joint training exercises.”
On Sunday, SAF claimed to have wrested back control, adding that over a hundred RSF vehicles had fled the base with the Egyptian pilots in their custody. On Monday, the RSF in turn claimed control over Merowe airbase with a video showing its troops in front of a fighter plane.
Fighting is also underway for control over Sudan’s main seawater port facing Saudi Arabia across the Red Sea in the city of Port Sudan. SAF claimed to have taken over RSF’s bases in Port Sudan, along with those in Kassala in eastern Sudan, Gedaref and Damazin in the southeast, close to the Ethiopian border, and Kosti and Kadugli in the south, close to the border with South Sudan.
More bloodletting in Darfur
Intense fighting is also underway in Sudan’s western region of Darfur, which is the old stomping ground of the RSF. The militias used by the state under Bashir’s dictatorship, to commit alleged war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Darfur during the civil war which started in 2003, were coalesced into RSF under Hemeti’s command in 2013.
While Bashir is on trial for these crimes at the International Criminal Court (ICC), RSF has become a powerful organization with a vast financial network built on mining gold from Darfur’s lands, where it has continued an alleged depopulation campaign in cahoots with the SAF.
This piece was originally published in People’s Dispatch
