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FIGHTING HAS CONTINUED into a second week in Sudan, with countries, including Ireland, now moving to evacuate diplomats and citizens amid fears of a further escalation.
According to figures from the United Nations (UN), more than 420 people have been killed and over 3,700 wounded, amid fears of wider turmoil and a humanitarian disaster in the northeast African country, which is one of the world’s poorest nations.
Khartoum has seen some of the fiercest fighting with air strikes and tanks firing in densely packed districts. Most of its five million people are continuing to shelter at home in 35-degree heat without electricity, food or water.
The conflict is being fought by two opposing sides, the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) led by General Abdel Fattah al Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces under the command of General Mohamed ‘Hemedti’ Hamdan Dagalo.
Despite international calls for a truce, efforts to impose a ceasefire before the end of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr failed last week.
Violence erupted between the country’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan’s capital city of Khartoum last weekend.
It came after weeks of deepening tensions between military leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his number two, paramilitary commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, over the planned integration of the RSF into the regular army.
The pair took joint control of the country in 2021 when they orchestrated a coup, upending a fragile transition to civilian rule that had been started after the 2019 ousting of Omar al-Bashir, who had been in power for nearly three decades.
Burhan, a career soldier from northern Sudan, took the top job while Dagalo, from Darfur’s pastoralist camel-herding Arab Rizeigat people, assumed responsibility as his number two.
But joint rule has now collapsed due to the rivalry between the two men.
“It was never a genuine alliance or partnership, they just had to tie their interests together to face the civilians as a united military front,” according to independent researcher and policy analyst Hamid Khalafallah.
Dagalo, commonly known as Hemeti, has since said the coup was a “mistake” that has failed to bring about change and invigorated remnants of Bashir’s regime.
As the army and civilian leaders came together to hammer out a deal to end the political crisis that began with the coup, the integration of the RSF into the regular army became a key sticking point.
For Alan Boswell, Horn of Africa director at the International Crisis Group, Daglo saw in the agreement an opportunity to become “more autonomous from the military” and enact “very large political ambitions”.
According to analyst Kholood Khair, a December framework agreement for the deal “ratcheted up tensions between Burhan and Hemeti,” when it “elevated Hemeti’s position into Burhan’s equal, rather than his deputy”.
Created in 2013, the RSF emerged from the Janjaweed fighters that now-jailed Islamist dictator Bashir unleashed against non-Arab ethnic minorities in the western Darfur region a decade earlier, drawing accusations of war crimes.
The militiamen were part of a campaign of terror that saw Bashir indicted for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide by the International Criminal Court.
The Military Balance+, compiled by International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), estimates that the army has 100,000 troops, compared with the RSF’s 40,000 fighters.
However, several experts have put forward the figure of 100,000 RSF troops, while giving numerical superiority to the army, or Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).
But on the ground, neither side seems to have seized the advantage in over a week of fighting.
In 2015, the heavily armed RSF was deployed alongside regular Sudanese forces in the civil war in Yemen as part of the Saudi-led coalition, which helped boost Dagalo’s profile abroad.
According to experts, the force has also been involved in the conflict in neighbouring Libya.
The RSF has been accused of more atrocities since, in particular as part of a security crackdown after the ouster of Bashir, when at least 128 people were killed in a violent dispersal of a Khartoum sit-in in June 2019.
“The RSF has continued to grow stronger since 2019,” Boswell added.
Currently, there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight. According to Aly Verjee of the Rift Valley Institute, neither the armed forces nor the RSF has much incentive to back down.
The two forces normally fight together against rebel groups in far-flung provinces, but this time they are in a race against time as they fight each other in Khartoum.
The RSF wants to prolong the conflict, while the army was aiming to use its warplanes to weaken the paramilitary force as quickly as possible, said Verjee.
“Hemeti… has an interest in stretching out the conflict” since the main difference “in capacity between the SAF and the RSF is air power”, said Verjee.
Jehanne Henry, a US human rights lawyer who has monitored Sudan for years, said the “doomsday scenarios run the gamut”.
If the army wins, “Burhan and his colleagues will re-install old regime Islamists” and ignore international pressure, as they did during decades of international embargo under Bashir’s rule.
“At best, they could make a flimsy pretence of appointing some allied civilians,” Henry said.
The other possibility was that the RSF win, but that scenario was seen as less likely, she added.
In such a case, “they won’t go down easily, and could draw out the conflict, allying with other armed groups in peripheral areas”.
With continued clashes and no ceasefire on the cards, countries have moved early to evacuate diplomats, embassy staff and citizens from Sudan.
On Saturday, Saudi Arabia said it evacuated 157 people, including 91 Saudi nationals and citizens of other countries.
US special forces evacuated some 70 US embassy staff from Khartoum to an undisclosed location in Ethiopia early on Sunday, while the UK evacuated a number of British diplomats and their families.
Two French flights took off on Sunday from Khartoum to Djibouti, carrying about 200 people from various countries, and more are planned for today.
Germany’s foreign ministry said a military plane carrying 101 German diplomatic staff, family members and citizens of partner countries who were evacuated from Sudan via Jordan has landed safely in Berlin.
About 100 people were flown out of Khartoum by Spanish military aircraft – more than 30 Spaniards and the rest from Portugal, Italy, Poland, Ireland, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia and Argentina, the foreign ministry said.
This morning, Tánaiste Micheál Martin confirmed that 50 Irish citizens had been evacuated since yesterday with the support of France and Spain.
He estimated that around 150 Irish citizens remain in Sudan and urged citizens to stay indoors until there is further information, adding that it will take “days” to evacuate all Irish citizens.
Meanwhile, the UN has said that between 10,000 and 20,000 people have fled fighting to Sudan’s western neighbour Chad.
The UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, said eastern Chad was already hosting 400,000 Sudanese refugees, and the new arrivals were placing additional strain on the country’s overstretched public services and resources.
Sudan is one the world’s poorest countries, with more than one-third of its population facing a growing hunger crisis.
“Millions of civilians are caught in the crossfire and fast running out of basic necessities,” the International Crisis Group (ICG) said Thursday.
Cameron Hudson of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) told AFP he was “fully expecting a massive exodus of civilians” once the first lasting ceasefire takes hold.
“I am expecting millions of people to try to cross borders,” he said.
According to Boswell, “this is an existential power struggle on both sides”.
Many suspect that the RSF may be receiving ammunition and supplies from abroad, via neighbouring nations.
Dagalo met recently with the son of eastern Libyan military strongman Khalifa Haftar, but Haftar’s spokesman Ahmad al-Mesmari, said last week the force “categorically denies” it was backing either side.
Sudan’s west, where the RSF also holds positions on the Chadian border, is also still “awash in weapons”, said Eric Reeves, a fellow at the Rift Valley Institute think tank.
Daglo will try “to use his connection to Chad and his power in Darfur to secure a supply line”, he added.
With neither general backing down, Khair finds it “unlikely they’ll come to the negotiating table without one or both of them suffering heavy losses”.
Though both continue to make “bellicose” statements against each other, she told AFP, “neither of them will come out of this unscathed”.
The longer they battle it out in city streets, she said, the higher the civilian toll climbs and the harder it will be for either general to rule over the wreckage.
“Both sides are strong enough that any war between them will be extremely costly, deadly and long,” said Boswell.
Even with a partial victory for either side in Khartoum, “war will continue elsewhere in the country”, dividing up Sudan into strongholds, he added.
“We’re already in worst case scenario territory, and from here the scenarios only get grimmer and grimmer,” he said, warning the impact will ripple throughout the region.
If the conflict drags on, more people in the extremely fragmented Sudanese society might take up arms, said British analyst Alex de Waal.
“There are two protagonists,” he told AFP. “If the conflict continues, the situation will quickly become more complex.”
Each side is a coalition of several different groups, de Waal noted, who may shift their alliances potentially considering “ethnic factors”.
The New York-based Soufan Center warned of “meddling from external states, warlords, armed militias and a range of other violent non-state actors”.
“A failure by commanders to rein in their fighters could further prolong violence,” the think tank said.
Additional reporting by © AFP 2023 and the Press Association
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Well, I didn’t see that coming tbh, but anything is better than the shinners trying to claim ownership of it.
Nobody owns it but SF it seems are the only ones willing to celebrate it..
“celebrate” it by creating an anti-social scene on Moore Street. Thuggish behaviour is not celebration.
Would that be like the “anti-social scene” the men and women of 1916 created?
Unfortunately the powers-that-be in our great little country don’t listen to (and permanently lie to) it’s citizens, so what else to do?
Give it a rest, we can all celebrate/commemorate it together, stop being so divisive.
You call occupying a building anti social and thuggish behaviour. Do you even know what the Easter Rising was you numpty, people occupying buildings but with weapons. I suppose that was thuggish behaviour as well. Laughable that a clown with that imbecile O’Duffy as your name and picture talking about thuggish behaviour. You mustn’t be the brightest spark, or wasn’t listening during history class.
….@oduffy and vinnie.
Phil the thing is I can guarantee you those two have never before been to an Easter Rising commemoration before, and if they do go to an event this year it’ll more than likely be the only one they attend. SF proudly remember the Rising every year so I must say it’s to be welcomed that the establishment parties have put on events this year, even if some are half hearted exercises just for show. Will they bother celebrating iy next year though, probably not.
It would surprise me in the least if Enda was holding a placard saying “Careful Now” outside the GPO Easter Sunday this year…
Rise to the pseudonym trolls lads. Exactly what he wants.
I doubt either of them have any interest in events.
Out come the shinnerbots with the usual BS and insults. You really are a pathetic bunch.
@Vinnie,
You brought up “the shinners” in your own post.
@pjm the facts don’t support your lie… But tell the lie big enough and often enough and eventually you will change truth… Robert Mac Sands was starved to death by the wicked witch of Finchley because he asked her nicely to give peace loving members of the Irish Respect Association basic human rights like flushing toilets and Yorkshire pudding.
What are you talking about you demented fool, are you kissed drunk or what?
*pissed
Vinnie (or whatever you are calling yourself these days), Danny Morrison wrote a piece in the Examiner the other day. http://www.irishexaminer.com/viewpoints/analysis/no-one-owns-or-has-a-monopoly-on-the-rising-or-its-legacy-375428.html Here are some excerpts.
“No one, not the IRA, not Sinn Féin, not Fianna Fáil nor Fine Gael, nor any party or organisation, owns or has a monopoly on the Rising or its legacy”
“It is easier to repeatedly attack Sinn Féin, and internalise our problem, than it is to confront the British government on collusion, its agencies’ involvement in bombings and assassinations, including the killing of dozens in Dublin and Monaghan.”
“If Sinn Féin and the DUP can share power in the North, given our bloody past, then isn’t it about time that Fine Gael, Fianna Fail and Labour ‘cease-fired’ in the South, stopped using the Troubles as a substitute for political debate, and simply agreed to disagree about the legacy of 1916 whilst honouring the undoubted bravery of the men and women who fought at Easter Week?”
You better report that “thuggish” behavior, but be prepared to be laughed at by the cops.
Good link Brian.
Agree, worth a read.
Don’t you recognise the story your official textbooks will contain when the thousand year Marxist-Adamsian reign is five years old and getting fat on the corruption of power? You already believe the armed struggle was so you could have Devon cream teas in the shadow of Lord Carson.
Can’t we all just get along!
The Irish people own this. Sinn Fein and people like James Connolly’s grandson are defending it against the spin and revisionism of this government – shame on them.
Fair play to Google. After all the years of paying low tax to the country and not employing the educated workforce as much as they said they would they’re finally giving back. Hopefully more Irish based activities on their website over the next few years.
That is a pretty stupid comment. They employ about 1000 Irish graduates and planned only about 100. Just because you did not make the cut does not mean they are not employing.
hahahahahahaha
Make the cut ? Good one pal.
This presentation was not approved by Sinn Fein’s Historical Revisions Council.
At best it should be viewed cautiously.
Thankfully SF want to celebrate our history unlike the blue shirts who want to destroy it.
Interesting when you click on the photos of the Moore Street buildings that most of the street was knocked down, completely flattened.
You’d wonder how many original buildings are even left standing on Moore Street now, looks like very few are original from that Google photo.
Very good from google well worth a look
I wonder if Colin’s narration is on a par with Richard Burton on War of the Worlds.
All aboard the train, which will be the ego trip every tom, dick and Harriet will jump on! I can see the centenary beginning hijacked by those who think it will be cool to go into o’ connell street on easter Monday… Then forget all about it!
How to access the site ? Can anyone help?
Google it?
Great viewing, I never knew the Rotunda Maternity Hospital was the first Maternity hospital in the world. Well done Colin Farrell. Have you read “WHEN THE CLOCK STRUCK IN 1916″ great read, tells the story as it was. Hope they make a movie out of it. Website is “dublinrising.withgoogle.com. Well done Google.
This is very impressive. Its a pity the “journeys” from one site to another go at such a breakneck speed. If slower it would give people are not familiar with Dublin a better opportunity to see the city as it is today
WHO’S VERSION OF HISTORY?
have your say