Ten civilians were killed on Thursday January 11 in an exchange of artillery fire in a residential area of Khartoum, the capital of Sudan torn apart since April 2023 by a war between rival generals, pro-democracy activists announced.
“Ten civilians were killed in an exchange of artillery fire in a residential neighborhood and in the local market”, reports the “Resistance Committee” of Khartoum’s southern belt, a neighborhood organization that manages mutual aid between residents.
Launched on April 15, the war between the army led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane and the dreaded paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo, has claimed more than 12,000 lives, according to a highly underestimated estimate by the NGO Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (Acled).
It has also displaced more than seven million people, according to the UN. Diplomatic efforts for peace negotiations, notably by the USA, Saudi Arabia and, more recently, the East African regional bloc Igad, have so far failed.
Before their confrontation, Generals Burhane and Daglo had joined forces to carry out a putsch and oust civilians from power in October 2021, ending two years of democratic transition.
Unable to gain the upper hand since the start of the war, both sides are stalling, but neither intends to make any concessions at the negotiating table. On the ground, however, the RSF seems to have been taking over new swathes of the country for months in the face of weak resistance from the army.
They now control the streets of Khartoum, almost all of the vast western region of Darfur, and have penetrated the state of al-Jazira, in the east-central part of the country, which hosts a large proportion of the displaced population.