Guadi Calvo
In the face of international indifference, the Sudanese civil war, which broke out last April 15, between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) under the orders of the army chief, General Abdel-Fattah Burhan and the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, alias Hemetti, a former smuggler and camel herder turned general after his aberrant services to the dictator Omar al-Bashir in the Darfur genocide in the first decade of this century.
The escalation of war in Sudan is becoming more and more intense, while the denunciations of multiple NGOs and different social groups in the African country continue to go unheard.
Once again, as it has happened four times since its independence in 1956, 47 million Sudanese find themselves immersed in a conflict, of which there is no certain prospect of an agreed resolution, between the two participating sides, which seem determined to fight to the last man.
More than half a dozen cease-fires have failed at the Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) table, where both sides, monitored by Riyadh and Washington, are unable to reach an agreement, not even to establish humanitarian corridors to bring food and medicine to the most devastated populations.
On this occasion, the conflict has a characteristic that those of 1955, 1972, 1983 and 2005 did not have, one of the main epicenters of the fighting is located in the urban core of the capital of the country, Khartoum, which together with Khartoum North and Omdurman or Umm-Durmān, gather a population close to nine million souls, and that, from the very beginning of the fighting, the city has been the target of the cross attacks of both sides.
Those who have destroyed the entire health network, so that practically not a single hospital remains fully operational, if any has survived the bombardment of the SAF or the heavy artillery of the RSF, it does so in extremely precarious conditions, with serious shortages of medicines and doctors and nurses with shifts of 32 hours. The electrical service has also been annihilated, communications, telephone and internet, and most of the food supply centers. over the junction of the Blue Nile and the White Nile, which continue to flow together to the north, forming the mythical Nile River, which, after crossing the whole of Egypt, finally flows into the Mediterranean, after flowing through the Lower Egyptian delta, one of the largest in the world.
Sudan’s location is of great geostrategic importance, since it is an important crossroads from the Maghreb and the Sahel to the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea.
This undoubtedly has an impact on the entire regional economy, while the local economy, according to local economists, so far during the conflict, has suffered losses of about nine billion dollars, while it is estimated that the looting of private property, businesses, public buildings and other institutions is estimated at approximately another forty billion dollars. The conflict has fundamentally affected the industrial, banking and financial sectors, due to the impact on exports, imports, foreign investments, particularly in the oil and gold sectors.
The fighting in Khartoum has forced more than three million people to leave the city and its surrounding areas since the beginning of the war, according to the United Nations (UN), practically half of the population. While those who remain, have been stranded, mainly for economic reasons or who had come in search of protection from the Kordofan or Darfur provinces, where in the first weeks of fighting had been more intense than those in the capital.
In these last weeks, two bombings left more than seventy civilian casualties, constituting one of the most virulent bombardments in Khartoum since the beginning of the war, The first and most serious was against the souk.
At least thirty people were killed after the SAF shelled the souk of al-Shabbi, in the city of Umm-Durmān, last Tuesday, July eleventh, the shooting is believed to have come from the military base of Karri, controlled by the army.
The previous Saturday, another forty people had been killed in the Dar-es-Salaam neighborhood, also in the Unm- Durmān sector. As a result of air strikes by the army.That neighborhood, would have been targeted with particular interest, since it has been mostly settled there members of the Rizagat tribe, to which General Hemetti, head of the RSF, and many of his men belong. Therefore, practically all the dead neighbors were linked to RSF militiamen. After the attacks, many families began to leave the area.
The army also concentrated its actions against positions of Hemetti’s paramilitary forces in Old Unm- Durmān and several places in Saliha, south of the same city. Intense attacks have also been reported in the town of El-Obeid, 350 kilometers south of Khartoum, where another twenty civilians were reportedly killed.
On Thursday morning, the RSF militias attacked a group of civilians, presumably family members, who were waiting for SAF troops, with a drone in the areas of al-Azuzab and Wad Ajeeb, south of Khartoum, leaving at least fourteen dead and fifteen wounded.
Darfur, same victims, same executioners
The great majority of the 330,000 Sudanese who have arrived in Chad since the beginning of the fighting come from the Darfur region, where, as was the case from 2005 to 2009, Hemetti’s forces have concentrated all their operations against the Masalit ethnic group. Adding to the nearly 400,000 who have arrived in Chad over the last twenty years.
At the same time, a new genocide is taking shape, with the same reasons: the possession of the land; the same victims, the black, Masalit, Christian and animist population and the same executioners, camel drivers of Arab origin, of the Rizagat tribe and Muslims.
In Darfur, the dead continue to multiply and to be ignored, as happened at the beginning of this century, a massacre which then resulted in at least 500,000 murders of the Masalit, pursued by the Arab camel drivers known as Janjaweed (armed horsemen, the germ of the current Rapid Support Forces, reconverted by decision of the former dictator Omar al-Bashir into a paramilitary force.It has just become known that in the area of al-Turab al-Ahmar (red land), west of El-Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, and in the vicinity of an important police base.As reported by the United Nations on the thirteenth, nearly ninety Masalits were buried in a mass grave, killed by the security forces.
In anticipation that these massacres will continue to be perpetrated, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is expanding the Ourang refugee camp in the Chadian province of Ouaddaï, awaiting the imminent arrival of another 35,000 refugees fleeing the actions of the RSF, ready, this time, to settle the issue of the Masalit and other similar ethnic groups.
The number of Sudanese fleeing the war continues to increase steadily, and is estimated to be close to one million refugees in neighboring countries, mainly Chad and Egypt, although South Sudan is also receiving constant contingents from its northern neighbors, according to figures from the International Organization for Migration (IOM). On a smaller scale, Ethiopia with about 26 thousand and the Central African Republic (CAR) with a number that does not exceed 17 thousand souls. According to figures from the International Organization for Migration (IOM). And on a smaller scale Ethiopia with about 26 thousand and the Central African Republic (CAR) in a number that does not exceed 17 thousand souls.
According to IOM, the majority of the displaced belong to the state of Khartoum, and the country’s capital city, followed by Darfur, with its four regions of West, North, South and Central, as well as North and South Kordofan.
While the humanitarian situation for both internally displaced persons and refugees outside the country is worsening alarmingly, agricultural production has practically come to a standstill while the imminent rainy season, with the consequent floods, will deepen the crisis situation, not only food, but the spread of diseases is expected, which given the lack of resources to control them will surely lead to epidemics, forcing a requiem throughout Sudan.
INTERNATIONALIST 360° 