Ajit Karn
South Sudan, a neighbor and mediator, announced that Sudan’s warring military factions have agreed to a new and extended seven-day ceasefire beginning Thursday, despite the fact that increased air strikes and gunfire in the Khartoum capital region undermined their most recent purported ceasefire.
In theory, previous ceasefires lasted between 24 and 72 hours, but they were routinely violated in the mid-April conflict between the army and a paramilitary force.
South Sudan’s foreign ministry announced in a statement on Tuesday that mediation efforts championed by President Salva Kiir led both parties to agree to a longer ceasefire from May 4 to 11 and to name peace envoys.
It was unclear how army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the leader of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, could make it work this time.
Tuesday, witnesses reported additional airstrikes in the communities of Omdurman and Bahri, which are located on the opposite bank of the Nile from Khartoum.
Al Jazeera, a pan-Arab television network, reported that Sudanese army warplanes were attacking RSF positions, with anti-aircraft fire audible from Khartoum.
Army aircraft have bombed RSF units entrenched in residential neighborhoods of the capital region. In Sudan’s western Darfur region, where the RSF emerged from tribal militias that fought alongside government forces to suppress rebels in a brutal 20-year-old civil war, the conflict has also spread.
The commanders of the army and RSF, who had shared power as part of a transition to free elections and civilian government supported by the international community, show no sign of backing down, but neither appears capable of achieving a quick victory.
REGION AT RISK
Protracted conflict may attract outside powers.
Hundreds of people have been slain as Khartoum, one of Africa’s largest cities, has been engulfed in fighting for the first time during the past three weeks. According to the United Nations, it has also created a humanitarian crisis, with approximately 100,000 people compelled to flee to neighboring countries with little food or water.
Aid deliveries were halted in a country where two-thirds of the population relied on outside assistance. As Sudan’s impoverished neighbors contend with a refugee influx, a broader catastrophe may be imminent.
“The entire region could be affected,” Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi said in an interview with a Japanese newspaper as a Burhan envoy conferred with Egyptian officials in Cairo on Tuesday.
The World Food Programme of the United Nations announced on Monday that it was resuming operations in the safer regions of the country following a pause during the conflict, during which some of its staff were killed.
Michael Dunford, the WFP’s East Africa Director, told Reuters that Port Sudan, where thousands of people who escaped Khartoum to seek evacuation abroad, is the primary entry point for aid.
As part of an international humanitarian endeavor, Kenya has offered its airports and airstrips close to the border with South Sudan.
“THE SITUATION IS A DISASTER”
Medecins Sans Frontières (MSF) stated that it had delivered some aid to Khartoum, despite the fact that supplies sent to Port Sudan for other aid agencies were still anticipating safe passage to Khartoum, an 800 km (500 mile) journey by road.
Approximately 330,000 Sudanese have been displaced within Sudan’s borders, according to the United Nations Migration Agency.
“We lost the majority of our savings, our purchasing power decreased, and we have no sources of income… Hassan Mohamed Ali, a 55-year-old state employee, stated as much during a stopover in Atbara, 350 kilometers (220 miles) northeast of Khartoum and en route to the Egyptian border.
“We endure power and water outages, and our children have stopped attending school.” What is taking place in Khartoum is horror.”
In addition, displaced Sudanese families have traveled hundreds of miles to Chad and South Sudan, sometimes on foot under the blazing desert sun.
U.N. estimates that 800,000 people may eventually flee.
In the past two weeks, more than 40,000 individuals have crossed the border into Egypt, but only after days of delays and after paying hundreds of dollars to travel the 1,000 km (620 miles) north from Khartoum.
Aisha Ibrahim Dawood and her relatives traveled five days in a rented car from Khartoum to the northern town of Wadi Halfa, where the women and children were crowded into the back of a truck and brought to a line at the Egyptian border.
“There is a great deal of red tape (to enter Egypt). Our tribulations are unprecedented. “However, we can endure anything, including the sounds of gunfire (in Khartoum) and the heat of the crowded truck,” she said.
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(Additional reporting contributed by Nafisa Eltahir in Cairo, Emma Farge and Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber in Geneva, Duncan Miriri in Nairobi, and Ayenat Mersie in Dollow, Somalia; writing by Angus McDowall and Mark Heinrich; editing by Edmund Blair, Nick Macfie, and Andrew Cawthorne)
