At least 97 civilians have been killed and 365 injured since the fighting in Sudan started, said one doctor’s group as quoted by Reuters on Monday.
The fighting erupted on Saturday between army units loyal to General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of Sudan’s transitional governing Sovereign Council, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, who is deputy head of the council.
Reuters reported that in a video released on Monday soldiers from Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces claim to have taken over Merowe airport as fighting with the Sudanese army continues.
Reuters said it was able to confirm the location from the buildings seen in the video which matched file and satellite imagery of the area. Reuters was not able to independently confirm the date the video was filmed.
It was the first such outbreak since both joined forces to oust veteran Islamist autocrat Omar Hassan al-Bashir in 2019 and was sparked by a disagreement over the integration of the RSF into the military as part of a transition towards civilian rule.
Burhan and Hemedti agreed a three-hour pause on Sunday to allow humanitarian evacuations proposed by the United Nations, the UN mission in Sudan said as quoted by Reuters, but the deal was widely ignored after a brief period of relative calm.
