Around noon, airstrikes again shook the center of Khartoum, targeting the area around the army headquarters, according to eyewitnesses. Several hospitals were badly damaged in the fighting in Khartoum. According to the Sudanese doctors’ union, four clinics were hit in the city of El Obeid, 350 kilometers south of the capital. A total of 70 percent of the hospitals in the combat zone are “out of order,” the union said.
A Sudanese employee of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) was killed south of El Obeid on Thursday. The 49-year-old man got into an exchange of gunfire while driving with his family and was hit, said IOM Director General António Vitorino. Three World Food Program (WFP) workers were killed in Sudan on Sunday.
Meanwhile, diplomatic efforts to establish a ceasefire continued. British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly interrupted a trip to the Pacific because of the situation in Sudan, according to London sources. In Berlin, a spokeswoman for the Federal Foreign Office said Germany’s goal was a ceasefire in order to be able to provide humanitarian aid.
According to Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD), the federal government is making particular efforts to evacuate German citizens in Sudan. “We are considering how we can get people out of there,” said Pistorius on Friday at the sidelines of a meeting of the Ukraine contact group at the US air base in Ramstein. According to the Federal Foreign Office, a “low three-digit number” of German citizens have so far asked for an evacuation from Sudan.
At the EU level, too, efforts are continuing to bring about a ceasefire and the evacuation of around 1,500 citizens from EU countries. An EU representative told the AFP news agency that this had to be done “overland” because of the closure of the airport in Khartoum.
On Thursday, UN Secretary-General António Guterres and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called for a three-day ceasefire. A ceasefire on Eid al-Fitr, also known as the Sugar Festival, must be a “first stage” and enable a lasting ceasefire. However, both the army under the command of de facto ruler Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitary RSF fighters under leader Mohamed Hamdan Daglo ignored the appeals.
Meanwhile, the US announced that it would send soldiers to the region to facilitate a possible evacuation of its citizens. According to information from Tokyo and Seoul, South Korea and Japan wanted to bring their citizens out of Sudan with military aircraft.
In the country itself, army chief and de facto ruler al-Burhan appeared on television for the first time since the fighting began. In a speech at the Sugar Festival, he said that instead of joy, there was “destruction and despair” in the country. “We hope to emerge from this stage more united,” he said.
The fighting is the result of a deep rift between the army and the RSF, which was founded in 2013 by long-time ruler Omar al-Bashir. Army chief al-Burhan and RSF leader Daglo have been allies since taking power in 2019.
