Sudanese crowd at borders to escape amid shaky truce

CAIRO: Crowds of families have been growing at Sudan’s border crossing with Egypt and at a main port, desperately trying to escape their country’s violence and sometimes waiting for days with little food or shelter, witnesses said Wednesday. In the capital Khartoum, the intensity of fighting eased on the second day of a three-day truce.

Taking advantage of relative calm, many residents in Khartoum and the neighboring city of Omdurman emerged from their homes to seek food and water, lining up at bakeries or grocery stores, after days being trapped inside by the fighting between the army and a rival paramilitary group. Some inspected shops or homes that had been destroyed or looted.

“There is a sense of calm in my area and neighborhoods,” said Mahasen Ali, a tea vendor who lives in Khartoum’s southern neighborhood of May. “But all are afraid of what’s next.”

Still, gunfire and explosions could be heard in the city, though residents said clashes were in more limited pockets, mainly around the military’s headquarters and the Republican Palace in central Khartoum and around bases in Omdurman across the Nile River.

With the future of any truce uncertain, many took the opportunity to join the tens of thousands who have streamed out of the region of the capital in recent days, trying to get out of the crossfire between the forces of Sudan’s two top generals.

The generals’ war for power since April 15 has pushed the population to a near breaking point. Food has grown more difficult to obtain, electricity is cut off across much of the capital and other cities, and many hospitals have shut down. Multiple aid agencies have had to suspend operations, a heavy blow in a country where a third of the population of 46 million relies on humanitarian assistance.

Many Sudanese fear the army and its rival Rapid Support Forces will escalate their battle once the international evacuations of foreigners that began Sunday is completed. The British government, whose airlift is one of the last still ongoing, said it has evacuated around 300 people on flights out and plans four more Wednesday, promising to keep going as long as possible.

Sudanese in droves, meanwhile, have been making the exhausting 15-hour drive across the desert to access points out of the country — to the city of Port Sudan on the eastern Red Sea coast and to the Arqin crossing into Egypt at the northern border.

Large crowds of Sudanese and foreigners waited at the port in Port Sudan, trying to register for a ferry to Saudi Arabia. Dallia Abdelmoniem, a Sudanese political commentator, said she and her family arrived Monday and have been trying every day to get a spot. “Priority was given to foreign nationals,” she told The Associated Press.

Saudi Arabia said Wednesday it evacuated 1,674 people from 56 countries, as well as 13 of its citizens, from Sudan.

At the Arqin crossing, families have been spending their nights outside in the desert, waiting to be let in to Egypt. Buses were piled up at the crossing.

“It’s a mess — long lines of elderly people, patients, women and children waiting in miserable conditions,” said Moaz al-Ser, a Sudanese teacher who arrived along with his wife and three children at the border a day earlier. “Authorities on both sides don’t have the capacity to handle such a growing number of arrivals.”

The U.N. refugee agency UNHCR has said it is gearing up for potentially tens of thousands of Sudanese and others to flee into South Sudan. Tens of thousands of Khartoum residents have also fled to provinces neighboring Khartoum or even into already existing displacement and refugee camps within Sudan that house victims of past conflicts in the country and its neighbors.

At least 459 people, including civilians and fighters, have been killed, and over 4,000 wounded since fighting began, the U.N. health agency said, citing Sudan’s Health Ministry. The Doctors’ Syndicate which which tracks civilian casualties, said at least 295 civilians were killed and 1,790 others injured

The 72-hour cease-fire announced by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was to last until late Thursday night. Many fear that fighting will only escalate once evacuations of foreigners, which appeared to be in their last stages, are completed.

A series of short cease-fires the past week have either failed outright or brought only intermittent lulls that allowed evacuations of hundreds of foreigners by air and land. The two rival generals, army chief Abdel Fattah Burhan and RSF commander Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, have so far ignored calls for negotiations to end the crisis and have seemed determined to crush each other.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that their power struggle is not only putting Sudan’s future at risk, “it is lighting a fuse that could detonate across borders, causing immense suffering for years, and setting development back by decades.”

Guterres cited reports of armed clashes across the country, with people fleeing their homes in Blue Nile and North Kordofan states and across Western Darfur as well. Joyce Msuya, the assistant secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, told the Security Council “there have been numerous reports of sexual and gender-based violence.”

Msuya said the U.N. has received reports “of tens of thousands of people arriving in the Central African Republic, Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, and South Sudan.”

Burhan and Dagalo rose to power after a popular uprising in 2019 prompted the generals to remove Sudan’s longtime autocratic ruler Omar al-Bashir. Sudanese since have been trying to bring a transition to democratic rule, but in 2021 Burhan and Dagalo joined forces in a coup that purged a transitional government.

They fell out now amid tensions over a new rough plan to re-introduce civilian rule. Both the military and the RSF have a long history of brutalizing activists and protesters as well as other rights abuses.

Also on Wednesday, the military said Sudan’s former autocratic ruler Omar al-Bashir was being held in a military-run hospital, giving its first official statement on his location since the fighting erupted. An attack on the prison where al-Bashir and many of his former officials had been held, raised questions over his whereabout and allegations he was freed.

In a statement, the military said al-Bashir, former Defense Minister Abdel-Rahim Muhammad Hussein and other former officials had been moved to the military-run Aliyaa hospital before clashes broke out across the country. Al-Bashir was ousted in 2019 amid a popular uprising. Both al-Bashir and Hussein are wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes related to Darfur conflict.