The rival factions in Sudan agreed on a new 72-hour ceasefire starting Sunday, according to a statement by Saudi Arabian and the United States of America mediators on Saturday.
“The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the U.S. announce the agreement of representatives of the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces on a ceasefire throughout Sudan for 72 hours,” a Saudi Foreign Ministry statement said late Saturday.
More than 3,000 people have been killed and 6,000 injured since the conflict in Sudan erupted in mid-April, the country’s health minister Haitham Ibrahim told Saudi-owned al-Hadath TV on Saturday.
Ibrahim said only half of Khartoum’s 130 hospitals were still operating and all the hospitals in West Darfur state were out of service.
The deputy leader of Sudan’s ruling Transitional Sovereignty Council has termed the situation in the country as “catastrophic.”
“The situation in Sudan now is catastrophic,” Malik Agar said during a Saturday discussion session at the Cairo-based Egyptian Center for Strategic Studies.
“There is total destruction in Khartoum and the RSF are occupying residential neighborhoods,” he added.
Agar warned that Sudan’s collapse “means a complete collapse of the Horn of Africa.”
“The war must end with the army’s victory. The war must end with the support of the army but on condition that Sudan has only one army to defend it,” he added.
The Sudanese official accused the RSF of taking civilians as human shields. “They are treating the country as private property,” he added.
“We are confident that the army will win this war,” Agar stressed.
The disagreement had been fomenting between the army and the RSF in recent months over integrating the paramilitary group into the armed forces — a key condition of Sudan’s transition agreement with political groups.
Sudan has been without a functioning government since the fall of 2021 when the military dismissed Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok’s transitional government and declared a state of emergency in a move decried by political forces as a “coup.”
The transitional period, which started in August 2019 after the ouster of President Omar al-Bashir, she had been scheduled to end with elections in early 2024.
