Heavy fighting resumes in Sudan after 72-hour truce ends

Khartoum rocked by artillery shelling and gunfire, with fighter jets screaming overhead

A quiet street in Khartoum on Tuesday. AFP

Heavy fighting between the army and a rival paramilitary force broke out in the Sudanese capital on Wednesday shortly after a 72-hour truce mediated by Saudi Arabia and the US expired, according to residents.

They said Khartoum, as well as its twin cities of Bahri and Omdurman, were rocked early in the morning by heavy gunfire, artillery shelling and air strikes by low-flying jet fighters screaming overhead.

The army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been battling each other for supremacy since April 15, turning the Sudanese capital into a war zone, creating a major humanitarian crisis and forcing more than 2.5 million people to flee their homes.

Witnesses said army aircraft carried out air strikes in Bahri and reported artillery fire and heavy clashes in Omdurman and ground fighting in southern Khartoum.

“Air activity is very intense today across much of the city,” said Imad Sheekan, from the Shambat district in Bahri. “It has been one of the most harrowing days of the war,” he told The National.

Another resident of the capital, Noaman Ishaq, from Omdurman, said the fighting resumed about 90 minutes after the truce expired at 6am on Wednesday.

“The fighting started off lightly before it quickly intensified,” he told The National.

Late on Tuesday, the RSF claimed that army jet fighters and drones had bombed a military intelligence building its fighters have held since early in the war. There was no word from the army on the RSF claim.

The building is part of a sprawling complex near downtown Khartoum that houses the armed forces' headquarters and a presidential guesthouse.

The war between the RSF and the army is essentially a fight for supremacy between army chief Gen Abdel Fattah Al Burhan and his one-time ally and deputy, RSF commander Gen Mohamed Dagalo.

The war has killed at least 3,000 and injured twice as many, according to the Health Ministry. More than 2.5 million people have been displaced by the violence. Of those, more than 500,000 have fled to neighbouring countries, chiefly Egypt, Chad and South Sudan.

The war has spilt over into the troubled Darfur region in the est where the RSF and its allied Arab militias have gone on a killing, looting and torching spree in the town of Al Geneina near the border with Chad.

The fighters attacked members of the ethnic Masalit tribe in a replay of the genocidal civil war in Darfur in the 2000s, when the government and the Janjaweed militia, the RSF's forerunner, brutally crushed an uprising by ethnic Africans seeking equality with the country's mainly Muslim and Arab northern region.

Former dictator Omar Al Bashir, ousted in 2019, was indicted by the International Criminal Court more than a decade ago for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur. The Janjaweed is widely believed to have committed large-scale abuses against civilians during that war, which left 300,000 dead and 2.5 million displaced.

At least 1,100 people have been killed in the violence in Al Geneina and elsewhere in West Darfur state since the conflict began, according to activists, drawing strong international condemnation of the RSF.

RSF commander Gen Dagalo said he regretted the violence and pledged to investigate who is behind it. He also accused the army of handing out firearms to civilians in the area to sow sedition.