Sudan army commander disbands rapid reaction force

Sudan's army appeared to have gained the upper hand in a bloody power struggle with rival paramilitaries, launching air strikes against their bases, Al Arabiya quotes unnamed witnesses as saying.

At least 97 civilians had been killed and 365 injured since the fighting in Sudan started, said one doctor’s group.

On April 15, the fighting erupted between army units loyal to General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of Sudan’s transitional governing Sovereign Council, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, who is deputy head of the council.

It was the first such outbreak since both joined forces to oust Omar Hassan al-Bashir in 2019 and was sparked by a disagreement over integrating the RSF into the military as part of a transition towards civilian rule.

Burhan and Hemedti agreed on a three-hour pause in fighting from 4 p.m. local time (1400 GMT to 1700 GMT) to allow humanitarian evacuations proposed by the United Nations, the UN mission in Sudan said, but the deal was widely ignored after a brief period of relative calm.

As night fell residents reported the boom of artillery and the roar of warplanes in the Kafouri district of Bahri, which has an RSF base, across the Nile River from the capital Khartoum.

Eyewitnesses told Reuters the army was renewing air strikes on RSF bases in Omdurman, Khartoum’s sister city across the Nile, and the Kafouri and Sharg el-Nil districts of adjacent Bahri, putting RSF fighters to flight.

The United States, China, Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UN Security Council, European Union and African Union have appealed for a quick end to the hostilities that threaten to worsen instability in an already volatile wider region.

Efforts by neighbours and regional bodies to end the violence intensified on April 16. Egypt offered to mediate, and the regional African bloc Intergovernmental Authority on Development plans to send the presidents of Kenya, South Sudan and Djibouti as soon as possible to reconcile Sudanese groups in conflict, Kenyan President William Ruto’s office said on Twitter.

The eruption of fighting over the weekend followed rising tensions over the RSF’s integration into the military. Discord over the timetable for that has delayed the signing of an internationally-backed agreement with political parties on a transition to democracy after a 2021 military coup.