Sudan battles intensify on 3rd day; civilian deaths reach 97

The civilian death toll amid the conflict in Sudan rose to 97 by the third day of the battle

Gunbattles, airstrikes and shelling shook Sudan’s embattled capital Monday in a third day of heavy fighting between the army and a powerful rival force for control of the country, as the weekend’s civilian death toll rose to 97.

Rapid, sustained firing was heard near the military headquarters in central Khartoum, a key battle zone since fighting began, and white smoke rose from the area. Residents hunkering down in their homes reported power outages and incidents of looting.

“Gunfire and shelling are everywhere,” Awadeya Mahmoud Koko, head of a union for thousands of tea vendors and other food workers, said from her home in a southern district of the city.

She said a shell stuck a neighbor’s house Sunday, killing at least three people. “We couldn’t take them to a hospital or bury them.”

The clashes are part of a power struggle between Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, the commander of the armed forces, and Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, the head of the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group. The two generals are former allies who jointly orchestrated an October 2021 military coup that derailed Sudan’s short-lived transition to democracy.

Both men have dug in, saying they would not negotiate a truce, instead engaging in verbal attacks and demanding the other’s surrender.

Dagalo, whose forces grew out of the notorious Janjaweed militias in Sudan’s Darfur region, portrayed himself in a statement on Twitter on Monday as a defender of democracy and branded Burhan as the aggressor and a “radical Islamist.”