As fighting Tuesday rattled a fresh three-day truce mediated by the United States and Saudi Arabia, foreigners and Sudanese alike flooded out of the country’s capital Khartoum and other conflict areas.
Since the conflict between the forces loyal to the nation’s top two generals started on April 15, millions of Sudanese have been imprisoned in their homes.
Tens of thousands of heavily armed combatants from the military and its adversary, the Rapid Support Forces, are engaged in combat in densely populated residential areas, putting an end to normal civilian life.
The Associated Press was able to catch video of vacant streets and smoke rising over the capital of Khartoum.
Since the conflict started, there have been over 420 fatalities and over 3,700 injuries, including at least 273 civilians.
Although it has appeared that the military is winning the battle in Khartoum, the RSF still has control over a number of areas in the capital and the nearby city of Omdurman, in addition to having numerous sizable strongholds elsewhere throughout the nation.
The battle that has raged between forces loyal to the nation’s two senior generals since April 15 has been the subject of a number of brief cease-fires over the past week that have either failed completely or just brought about sporadic lulls.
There have been enough lulls to allow for the dramatic air and ground evacuations of hundreds of foreign nationals, which continued on Tuesday.
However, they haven’t provided any relief for the millions of Sudanese who are caught in the middle of the conflict and are scrambling to find food, shelter, and medical attention as looters and gunshots devastate their neighborhoods.
Many aid organisations were compelled to halt operations, and dozens of hospitals were forced to close in a nation where a third of the 46 million people already required humanitarian aid.
The United Nations refugee agency announced that it was preparing for the possibility of tens of thousands of refugees escaping into nearby nations.
Calls for negotiations to resolve the issue in the third-largest country in Africa have gone unanswered.
The withdrawal of diplomats, relief workers, and other foreigners, as well as the closing of embassies, are ominous indications that foreign powers anticipate the chaos to only become worse for many Sudanese.
