On Sunday night, nine people died in a “technical” plane crash in Sudan, where locals are pleading for food supplies to live in the East African nation that has been devastated for more than three months by a deadly conflict between the army and paramilitaries.
Millions of people have been stuck in their houses because to the ongoing conflict, mainly in the capital Khartoum and its northern suburbs, some without access to water. According to locals, they only occasionally have access to electricity and very little food.
A neighborhood committee in Khartoum issued a “urgent appeal” to the populace on Sunday to help: “We need to help one another, provide food and cash to those nearby,” they wrote.
Abbas Mohammed Babiker, a resident of Khartoum North, told AFP that his family had to limit itself to one meal a day. “And we only have enough left for two days,” he added.
“With the fighting, there is no longer a market and, in any case, we have no more money,” added another resident, Essam Abbas. At least all civil servants have not received their salaries since March.
According to numerous of his friends on Facebook, the prominent musician Khaled Senhouri, a violinist, “starved to death” in Omdourman, a town across from Khartoum, last week because he was unable to leave his house to acquire supplies.
The army reported that a civilian plane crash on Sunday evening claimed the lives of nine persons, including four soldiers, near Port Sudan, on the war-free east coast.
“One child survived” in the crash of this “civilian Antonov aircraft” at the airport, the only one in operation in the country, it added.
According to a recent assessment by the NGO Acled, 3.3 million people have been displaced, including refugees, and 3,900 people have been murdered since April 15 as a result of airstrikes by the army under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane and artillery and drone fire by General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
One in three Sudanese were already food insecure prior to the war. More than half of Sudan’s 48 million inhabitants require humanitarian aid today in order to survive, yet NGOs and the UN claim they are not allowed in.
The first gold shipment from Sudan, Africa’s third-largest producer, since the start of the conflict was declared by the authorities on Sunday in Port Sudan, where many officials are now based.
According to officials, the 226 kilogrammes were shipped to the United Arab Emirates, which is the country that purchases the most gold from Sudan.
In the same state of Port Sudan, the state-owned Mining Resources firm also reported the deaths of eight miners in an artisanal mine.
