NAIROBI — Renewed Fighting convulsed Sudan and its battered capital Friday, and Turkey reported that one of its evacuation planes had been shot at, despite world leaders’ trumpeting the renewal of an already flagging cease-fire.
Millions have been left stranded after fighting erupted between the military and the heavily armed paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on April 15. On Thursday night, a fifth cease-fire was announced, intended to last for three days, but like the others, it was immediately violated, with fighting in the capital and elsewhere even as world leaders welcomed the warring parties’ “readiness to engage in dialogue towards establishing a more durable cessation of hostilities and ensuring unimpeded humanitarian access.”
In an interview with U.S.-funded Arabic-language TV channel Al-Hurra on Friday, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the army chief and de facto head of state, said he would not negotiate with RSF commander Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. Burhan said he had proposed that both he and Hemedti step down, but that Hemedti had refused.
“It is unacceptable to sit with Hemedti as a rebel against the state,” Burhan said, though he voiced openness to initiatives led by a bloc of East African countries and the United States to stop the fighting.
The cease-fires, while never total, have occasionally resulted in reduced violence in some parts of the capital, allowing locals to flee and some evacuation flights for foreigners to take place.
Those flights, from an airfield just north of Khartoum, could be in danger after Turkey announced early Friday that “light weapons were fired on our C-130 evacuation plane, which was going to Wadi Sayidna for the mission of evacuating our citizens who were stuck in Sudan, where the clashes continued.” No Turkish personnel were injured, and the plane landed “safely,” the message said, without specifying when the attack occurred. Images posted online showed at least one bullet hole in the plane.
The army and RSF blamed each other for the attack. The airfield is secured by foreign troops and has been used to evacuate citizens from more than 41 nations so far, including France, Germany and Britain.
The United Kingdom said Friday that it would end its evacuation flights from Khartoum on Saturday as demand for seats declined. The operation has evacuated more than 1,500 people — most of them British — since Tuesday.
Canadian officials said Friday morning that they had grounded evacuation flights in part because of the situation involving the Turkish flight. In the afternoon, they said the airspace had reopened, and that they had resumed airlifts. Still, they stressed that they were in a race against the clock.
“The window to safely extract personnel by air is closing quickly,” the officials said at a briefing, speaking on the condition of anonymity under rules set by the government.
The United States has so far not undertaken any evacuations of nationals beyond Embassy personnel, leaving Americans to make their own way out of the country. Several hundred U.S. citizens have left Sudan by land, sea or air since the fighting began, State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said at a news conference Friday.
“So far fewer than 5,000 U.S. citizens have requested additional information from us,” he said. “Of those, only a fraction have actively sought our assistance to depart Sudan.”
But many are still trapped. Among them are members of one American family with two young girls who reported shooting on their street in Khartoum on Friday morning that peppered the lower walls of their home with bullets. They said that they have been trying to find a driver for more than six days to take them to safety but that prices are sky-high, petrol is scarce and drivers are afraid to enter neighborhoods where there is fighting.
Muawiya Jaden, 29, said there had been fighting in southern Khartoum since 7:30 a.m. He lives just under a mile from the army’s air defense command, he said.
“I am now talking to you from under the bed,” he said by phone. “There is no water, and we have not eaten any food since yesterday due to these clashes.”
Muhammad Abdul Rahman Abdullah, 24, said planes were bombing RSF positions near Jabal Awlia Hospital. “There is heavy deployment of the Rapid Support Forces infantry inside the neighborhoods after the battles intensified,” he said. “This area is densely populated.”
The United Nations’ human rights office accused RSF fighters on Friday of forcing civilians from their homes.
Conditions at the borders also are dire as thousands of people wait days in the desert, trying to flee through undermanned border crossings into Egypt or cram onto boats sent by Saudi Arabia to ferry people to Jiddah. At least two people have died at the Egyptian border crossing of Argeen, and others have needed intravenous fluids or CPR, witnesses have said.
In the vast and arid western region of Darfur, the scene of savage civil conflict in the past, a truce largely held until recently. Combat has occurred this week in the city of Geneina, which was spared the initial violence.
“Shooting is still going on in the market. … There are no government forces to protect citizens on the ground,” a 35-year-old Geneina resident said Friday. She declined to use her name out of fear of reprisals by security forces or other armed groups.
“There are injured people who were unable to reach the hospital,” she said. “There is no electricity or water.”
In an echo of the ethnic strife that plagued the region two decades ago and led to accusations of genocide, a witness told The Washington Post that the sudden outbreak of fighting has been mainly between the ethnically African Masalit groups and Arab Militant Groups.
The specter of renewed violence looms over Darfur, where hundreds of thousands of people were killed during a 20-year civil war that pitted Arab militant groups, known as the Janjaweed, against ethnically sub-Saharan African rebels.
The militant groups attacked the city from four directions Thursday morning, said the witness, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for security reasons. “They came with motorbikes, and they have some other vehicles,” he said. Eventually, a former rebel group known as the Sudanese Alliance, which signed the 2020 peace agreement that ended the war, repelled the attackers. The witness said 119 people had been killed in the fighting, adding to the 96 reported killed in the previous days. Markets and many homes and businesses had been looted, he said.
The dead were being collected in one place so people could try to identify them, he said, adding that many displaced families, including women and children, had been killed. The militant groups reportedly also burned down government offices.
“They are still picking up the bodies,” he said. “We have a small clinic in our area, and they are listing the names of the victims and those who are injured.”
On Friday, the Sudanese Alliance was patrolling the streets in armored vehicles.
“Janjaweed militias are targeting any Black person,” the witness said. “I fear this conflict in West Darfur will be a civil war.”
Meanwhile, in the North Darfur town of El Fasher, French troops who crossed the border from Chad after sunset evacuated aid workers from an airfield, one evacuee confirmed.
“With very close coordination and cooperation between the two fighting parties and the government of North Darfur, we managed to facilitate the evacuation of 113 humanitarian workers from different U.N. agencies and international nongovernmental organizations from El Fasher to Chad,” North Darfur’s governor, Maj. Gen. Nimir Abdulrahman, told The Post in a text message.
Claire Parker in Boston and Kareem Fahim in Istanbul contributed to this report.
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