Sudanese capital Khartoum has been turned into a desolate war zone by a month of fierce fighting between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
Shaken families have been huddling at home, with civilian houses becoming the collateral damage in the gun battles raging on the streets between the forces of army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the head of RSF, Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo.
Residents of Khartoum have endured weeks of desperate food shortages, power blackouts, communications outages and runaway inflation. Before the fighting erupted on April 15, the city of five million was considered a place of relative stability, but now shelling and air attacks are witnessed frequently.
Charred aircraft lie on the airport tarmac, foreign embassies are shuttered and hospitals, banks, shops and wheat silos have been ransacked by looters.
Violence also renewed in El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur state, leaving hundreds killed and the health system in “total collapse”, medics said.
Fighting continued on Monday, with loud explosions heard across Khartoum and thick smoke in the sky while warplanes drew anti-aircraft fire, according to witnesses.
