A power struggle between two generals has engulfed Sudan (Picture: Reuters)
Sudan is teetering on the brink of a ‘full-scale civil war’ that could throw the entire region into chaos, a top UN humanitarian boss has said.
Africa’s third-largest nation has been shaken for months by fighting between a paramilitary group the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Army.
The two warring generals have left hundreds of civilians dead and thousands more injured, the Sudanese American Physicians Association (Sapa) says.
After a US-brokered truce fell apart, healthcare services are rapidly unravelling, electricity is spotty at best, food and water are in short supply and millions have been displaced.
If this all continues, Martin Griffiths, chief of the UN’s humanitarian and emergency relief office, Sudan will spiral.
‘We don’t have a place, a forum, where the two parties are present… where we can broker the kind of basic agreements that we need to move supplies and people,’ he told The Associated Press.
The clashes have killed hundreds, injured thousands and displaced millions, UN officials say (Picture: Reuters)
Martin Griffiths, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, says Sudan is on the brink of a ‘civil war’ (Picture: Luiz Rampelotto/EuropaNewswire/Shutterstock)
Griffiths warns it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get aid into Sudan (Picture: AFP)
Getting humanitarian aid to Sudan is tricky, Griffiths said, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies chalking it up to a lack of funding and how aid and medical are being targeted by armed soldiers.
‘If I were Sudanese, I find it hard to imagine that this isn’t a civil war… of the most brutal kind,’ he added.
‘Part of that is it’s not limited to one place, it’s spreading, it’s viral.
‘It’s a threat to the state itself… and if that doesn’t qualify for being a civil war, I don’t know what does.’
‘We have to re-create the architecture that we had for a little while in Jeddah,’ Griffiths added of the Saudi and US-mediated talks.
While those discussions have been ‘very clunky’ and ‘time-consuming’, he said, they have produced ‘some real movement’ in getting aid to the ground.
Egypt, seen as an ally of the Sudanese army, said it would host a summit on Thursday to discuss ways to end a 12-week conflict.
Army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has been sparring with Rapid Support Forces chief Lt Gen Mohamed Hamda for weeks (Picture: AFP/Getty Images)
It comes after 22 people were killed by an airstrike in Omdurman (Picture: Reuters)
Top of the agenda should be establishing local ceasefires to carve out safe routes for trucks and goods to get into areas scarred by the fighting, Griffiths said.
Sapa recorded at least 828 civilian deaths and 3,688 injuries between 15 April and 23 May alone, though the association stresses the true death toll is likely higher.
The tension between Sudan’s years-long de facto leader, Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and Rapid Support Forces chief Lt Gen Mohamed Hamdan reached a flash point in April.
Though the two once staged a military coup to take control of Sudan in 2021, their relationship disintegrated and both have refused to give up power, whether to one another or to civilians.
The violence is spreading – fast – and has been especially deep within Darfur, a region of western Sudan home to not only rebel groups but Wagner, the Russian mercenary group.
Both the army and the RSF have begun targeting non-Arab tribes in western Darfur, UN officials say.
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In one of the deadliest attacks so far, Sudan’s health ministry on Saturday said a strike by fighter jets in Omdurman, a neighbouring city of Sudan’s capital, left 22 people dead.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres condemned the attack in a statement shared by his spokesman.
Guterres, the spokesman said, is ‘deeply concerned that the ongoing war between the armed forces has pushed Sudan to the brink of a full-scale civil war, potentially destabilising the entire region’.
‘There is an utter disregard for humanitarian and human rights law,’ he added, ‘that is dangerous and disturbing.’
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‘If I were Sudanese, I find it hard to imagine that this isn’t a civil war.’Â
