KARTOUM: Sudan’s embattled capital awoke on Monday to a third day of heavy fighting between the army and a powerful rival force for control of the country, as the weekend’s civilian death toll rose to 97.
Airstrikes and shelling intensified in parts of Khartoum and the adjoining city of Omdurman. Rapid, sustained firing was heard near the military headquarters, with white smoke rising from the area. Residents hunkering down in their homes reported power outages and incidents of looting.
“Gunfire and shelling are everywhere,” Awadeya Mahmoud Koko, head of a union for thousands of tea vendors and other food workers, said from her home in Khartoum.
She said a shell stuck a neighbour’s house on Sunday, killing at least three people. “We couldn’t take them to a hospital or bury them.” The clashes are part of a power struggle between Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, the commander of the armed forces, and Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, the head of the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group.
The two generals are former allies who jointly orchestrated an October 2021 military coup that derailed Sudan’s short-lived transition to democracy.
Both men have dug in, saying they would not negotiate a truce, instead engaging in verbal attacks and demanding the other’s surrender.
As per reports on Monday, Dagalo, whose forces grew out of the notorious Janjaweed militias in Sudan’s Darfur region, portrayed himself in a statement on Twitter as a defender of the democracy and branded Burhan as the aggressor and a “radical Islamist”.
Pro-democracy activists have noted that both generals have a long history of human rights abuses.