The year-old war in Sudan between rival generals vying for power has sparked “a crisis of epic proportions” fueled by weapons from foreign supporters who continue to flout UN sanctions aimed at helping end the conflict, UN Undersecretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs Rosemary DiCarlo said on Friday.
“This is illegal, it is immoral and it must stop,” DiCarlo told the UN Security Council.
Sudan plunged into chaos in April last year, when long-simmering tensions between its military, led by Sudanese Lieutenant-General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), commanded by his former deputy, Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, broke out into street battles in the capital, Khartoum. Fighting has spread to other parts of the country, especially urban areas and the western Darfur region.
Photo: Reuters
DiCarlo painted a dire picture of the war’s impact — more than 14,000 dead, tens of thousands wounded, looming famine with 25 million people in need of lifesaving assistance and more than 8.6 million forced to flee their homes.
Mohamed Ibn Chambas, chair of the African Union panel on Sudan and high representative for its Silence the Guns in Africa initiative, called external interference “a major factor compounding both the efforts to negotiate a ceasefire and to stop the war.”
“As a matter of fact, external support in terms of supply of war materiel and other needs has been the main reason why this war has lasted so long,” Chambas said. “It is the elephant in the room.”
Neither DiCarlo nor Chambas named any of the foreign supporters.
However, Burhan, who led a military takeover of Sudan in 2021, is a close ally of neighboring Egypt and Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi. In February, Sudan’s foreign minister held talks in Tehran with his Iranian counterpart amid unconfirmed reports of drone purchases for government forces.
Dagalo has reportedly received support from Russia’s Wagner mercenary group, as well as from Arab allied communities and new military supply lines running through Chad, Libya and South Sudan, UN experts said in a report.
The Arab-dominated RSF has carried out brutal attacks in Darfur on ethnic African civilians, especially the ethnic Masalit, and has taken control of most of the vast region.
Its newest target appears to be El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur.
UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Operations and Advocacy Division Director Edem Wosornu said RSF-affiliated militias attacked and burned villages west of El Fasher on Saturday las week.
“Since then, there have been continuing reports of clashes in the eastern and northern parts of the city, resulting in more than 36,000 people displaced,” Wosornu told the council.
She said that “the violence poses an extreme and immediate danger to the 800,000 civilians who reside in El Fasher, and it risks triggering further violence in other parts of Darfur — where more than 9 million people are in dire need of humanitarian assistance.”
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