Sudan’s army and a paramilitary force battled on Khartoum’s outskirts on Wednesday, undermining a truce in their 11-day conflict, but the army expressed willingness to extend the cease-fire.

The army late on Wednesday said its leader, General Abdel Fattah Burhan, gave initial approval to a plan to extend the truce for another 72 hours and send an army envoy to the South Sudan capital, Juba, for talks.

The Sudanese armed forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces previously agreed to a three-day cease-fire that is to expire late Thursday. There was no immediate response from the RSF to the proposal from the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, a regional bloc.

The military said the presidents of South Sudan, Kenya and Djibouti worked on a proposal that includes extending the truce and talks between the two forces.

“Burhan thanked the IGAD and expressed an initial approval to that,” the army statement said.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and African Union Commission Chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat discussed working together to create a sustainable end to the fighting, the State Department said in a statement Wednesday.

Fighting, marauding, ​looting

Some of Wednesday’s heaviest battles were in Omdurman, a city adjoining Khartoum where the army was fighting RSF reinforcements from other regions of Sudan, a Reuters reporter said. Heavy gunfire and airstrikes could be heard into the evening.

In Khartoum, which together with two bordering cities is one of Africa’s largest urban areas, gangs marauded and there was widespread looting.

Since fighting erupted on April 15, airstrikes and artillery have killed at least 512 people, wounded nearly 4,200, destroyed hospitals and limited food distribution in the vast nation where a third of the 46 million people relied on humanitarian aid.

WHO predicts ‘many more deaths’

The World Health Organization said 16% of health facilities were functioning in Khartoum and predicted “many more deaths” from disease and shortages of food, water and medical services including immunization.

The treatment of an estimated 50,000 acutely malnourished children has been disrupted by the conflict, and the hospitals that are still functioning are facing shortages of medical supplies, power and water, according to a United Nations update on Wednesday.

Deadly clashes broke out in Geneina in West Darfur on Tuesday and Wednesday, resulting in looting and civilian deaths and raising concerns about an escalation of ethnic tensions, the update said.

The crisis has sent growing numbers of refugees across Sudan’s borders, with the U.N. refugee agency estimating 270,000 people could flee into South Sudan and Chad alone.

Foreigners evacuated from Khartoum have described bodies littering streets, buildings on fire, residential areas turned into battlefields, and youths roaming with large knives.

The White House said a second American had died in Sudan.
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Leila Oulkebous’ research for her doctorate from one of France’s top universities was going well when the explosions started.

Oulkebous had stopped work on Ethiopia because of that country’s civil war, and her research in Sudan was going to be more straightforward, she thought.

Then Sudan exploded into violence. The chiefs of the country’s army and its rival Rapid Support Forces rose to power after a popular uprising in 2019 prompted them to remove longtime autocratic ruler Omar al-Bashir. They started fighting this month amid tensions over a new plan to re-introduce civilian rule.

The bombing shook the house where Oulkebous was living in the capital, Khartoum, investigating the effects of dams on rivers that cross borders.

“We were hiding all the time under the bed,” she said Wednesday at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport as hundreds of people arrived in harrowing evacuations. World powers were rescuing people from Sudan on planes and warships in operations prompted by the eruption of the fighting that sent thousands of foreigners and many more Sudanese people fleeing for safety.

A French frigate carrying hundreds of evacuees docked Wednesday morning in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, as part of broader efforts involving several warships, in addition to airlifts.

French military spokesman Colonel Pierre Gaudilliere said France evacuated more than 500 civilians from 40 nations by plane over the weekend after securing the airbase north of Khartoum on Saturday, using its airbase in neighboring Djibouti for the airlift.

Gaudilliere said the French military was the first to land and organized the flow of its own and other nations’ planes.

“You still had airstrikes as the operation was going on, crossfire in the streets, artillery fire, so it was and still is very intense fighting,” Gaudilliere said. The French military had personnel on the ground to assess the situation during the operation, he said.

Several nations, including Japan, thanked France for rescuing their citizens.

More evacuations under way

Some other countries quickly joined evacuation efforts.

Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky said Wednesday that three nationals had been evacuated with help from Germany, and his country was now working with Turkey to help evacuate two other citizens.

Greek national Christos Dedes, who was in Sudan for work, said he and his colleagues managed to leave their Khartoum hotel Tuesday via the Portuguese Embassy, which sent a car to drive them to the airbase where there were Italian, French and German soldiers.

“We just happened to leave with the Italians on a transport plane,” he said on Greek TV channel Mega on Wednesday, after he arrived in Athens.

From their Khartoum hotel, he said, they could see that “every day the battles were heavier. Both [sides] were using heavy weapons.” He said they would hear explosions at night and see bodies in the street.

More than 1,000 people from 58 countries were to arrive Wednesday by ship at Jeddah, including many on the French warship Lorraine.

Saudi Arabia on Saturday organized the first evacuation convoy by land, via cars and buses bringing people to Port Sudan, where a navy ship took them to Jeddah.

The French foreign affairs ministry said a flight carrying 184 French nationals and their families and about 20 other nationals returned from Djibouti and landed in Paris Wednesday morning.

Among them was Oulkebous, a Moroccan doctorate student at Bordeaux Montaigne University.

“The feeling I had since the first day of fighting was I felt really paralyzed, I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know how to get out, the airport was closed, we could not leave,” she said, describing “the explosions, the smoke, so really, I didn’t have the time to fully realize what was going on.”

A Royal Air Maroc plane arrived at Casablanca’s Mohammed V airport on Wednesday, carrying 136 Moroccan nationals evacuated from Sudan.

UK diplomats targeted

In contrast with France and some other nations, the United States and Britain didn’t evacuate nondiplomats at first.

The British government has come under growing criticism for its failure to airlift civilians. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak defended the government’s approach, saying diplomats had been evacuated first “because they were being targeted.”

The British government since said that 301 people had been evacuated on four U.K. flights from Sudan over the past 24 hours, and four more were scheduled Wednesday. Britain intends to keep running the flights for as long as possible. In addition, “rapid deployment teams” of U.K. officials are in Port Sudan assessing potential for a seaborne evacuation.

The Foreign Office says U.K. passport-holders are eligible, “and priority is given to family groups with children and/or the elderly or individuals with medical conditions.”

Officials have said there are as many as 4,000 British citizens in Sudan, 2,000 of whom have registered for potential evacuation.

The White House said Monday that the U.S. was helping from afar as thousands of Americans left behind in Sudan sought to escape fighting in the east African nation, after the U.S. Embassy evacuated all of its diplomatic personnel over the weekend and shut down.

The Biden administration was considering several options for assisting private American citizens in getting out of Sudan.

Two U.S. officials said one option being considered would be to send U.S. Navy vessels in, or en route to, the Red Sea to dock at Port Sudan and take Americans to Jeddah or another location. The officials said this would depend on the security situation and whether it was deemed safe for the ships to dock.

A U.S. official said the military has developed other options for getting Americans, including using an airfield that some European countries have used to fly out citizens. To date, it has not been told to do that, the official said.

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss sensitive matters.
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A Kenyan grandfather is blaming a lack of action by authorities for the deaths of dozens of people in a cult who starved themselves and their children to death. Kenyan investigators have uncovered at least 90 bodies of people who belonged to the Good News International Church. Hundreds of others affiliated with the church are still missing.

Investigators are in their sixth day of searching for the bodies of people who starved to death after being told that if they died this way, they would meet Jesus.

Francis Wanje rescued his grandson on March 17, two days after two of the boy’s brothers died of starvation.

The high school teacher had mobilized community members and police officers to check on his family, who lived with the cult in the Shakahola Forest in eastern Kenya.

“When I arrived there, on the 17th at around 2 p.m., I found my daughter, the husband and the mother of the husband,” Wanje said. “They were there and they were holding the firstborn, who was very weak and already waiting for him to die and be buried. They rescued the boy. My daughter, the husband and the mother disappeared in the forest. Up to today, they have not been found.”

Authorities in the area did not begin an active search for church members until last week. Wanje said if authorities had taken action earlier, the death toll would not be so high.

“Things were not handled the way they were supposed to be handled,” Wanje said. “If these people could have moved early enough, they could have saved many lives.”

Kenyan authorities have so far found the bodies of 90 church members. Another 34 people were rescued but the Kenyan Red Cross said 314 others are missing.

Kenyan authorities say members of the church were encouraged to not eat or drink by its founder, Paul Mackenzie, who describes himself as a pastor.

Antony Njeru, a theology student at Pan Africa Christian University, said Mackenzie’s ideology has no basis in Christian teachings.

“It’s an exploitation of people using the Bible but that is not biblical at all. It has no foundation in doctrine,” Njeru said. “You cannot take away people’s rights and say that the Bible tells people to fast to death. That’s nowhere in the Bible. His doctrine cannot be traced in the Bible, so we don’t believe he is a true pastor.”

Stephen Akaranga, a religious studies professor at the University of Nairobi, said people like Mackenzie prey on the poor and those who have not studied religion.

“Those people who are gullible are those who are not strong in their spirit, people who don’t understand about their religion, those who are least schooled and those people who are very poor and people who can easily be swayed by not understanding their faith truly,” he said. “So, you can find these are people who can now most likely be lured into some cult because this is not a religion.”

Kenyan government officials said they will fight religious extremism and radicalization of the population.

Njeru said the government needs to enforce relevant laws.

“Demanding accountability is still good, it is still OK we encourage that,” Njeru said. “We also encourage pastors to be open to scrutiny and at all times be open to their followers.”

Interior Cabinet Secretary Kithure Kindiki said Tuesday that Mackenzie will be prosecuted for the alleged deaths of his followers. He was arrested April 15 and remains in custody in the coastal city of Malindi.
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Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of a Russian government-backed paramilitary group, has offered weapons to one of the warring parties in Sudan, according to several media reports.

Since the fighting began in April, there have been unconfirmed reports and diplomatic sources who spoke to news outlets saying that Wagner fighters are supporting the paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces and supplying them with weapons.

Cameron Hudson, a former U.S. State Department official and a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told VOA that the Wagner Group is supplying portable air defense systems, shoulder-fired rockets, tank busters and heavy armor. 

The RSF denies receiving support from Russia.

As news emerges, however, that the Wagner Group could be taking sides, experts warn such external involvement can only worsen the conflict, citing the group’s negative track record and trail of atrocities in Africa.

In a rare admission to the group’s involvement in Sudan, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Tuesday that the decision to involve the Wagner Group is up to African leadership.  

“Central African Republic and Mali and Sudan, a number of other countries, whose governments, whose legitimate authorities turn for this kind of services [to Wagner Group], have the right to do so,” Lavrov told a news conference at the United Nations.

High-level U.S. officials continue to express concern over the involvement of the Wagner Group in Sudan, where it is involved in mineral extraction.

White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said that the group’s involvement has the potential to further ignite the conflict. 

“Obviously, we don’t want to see this conflict expand or broaden, and we certainly wouldn’t want to see additional firepower brought to bear; that will just continue the violence and continue to escalate the tensions,” he said.

The fight to grab power is between two generals, General Abdel Fattah Burhan, head of the armed forces, and General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, or Hemedti, the leader of the RSF paramilitary group.

Hemedti traveled to Russia shortly after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and has sought to win support from the Wagner Group.

“Through this visit, we hope to advance relations between Sudan and Russia to broader horizons, and strengthen the existing cooperation between us in various fields,” Dagalo said in a Twitter post at the time of his Moscow visit.

Jacqueline Burns is a senior policy analyst with RAND Corporation, a global policy research group. She said by supporting Hemedti, Russia is seeking to protect its own interests.

“Russia and the Wagner Group, they benefit from gold concessions in Sudan and the illicit smuggling of gold out of the country,” she told VOA. “The Wagner Group is siding with the party they think is most likely to be able to continue to secure these interests, particularly in opposition to any civilian-led government.” 

The Wagner Group’s history in Sudan dates to the previous government of Omar al-Bashir. Prigozhin had a close relationship with the autocratic leader, who allowed Wagner-affiliated companies access to gold mining. 

After the army ousted al-Bashir in 2019 amid a popular uprising, Wagner continued to have a close relationship with the Sudanese military, particularly the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces headed by Hemedti. This replicates its model of engagement in other African countries.

“Wagner Group does seem to engage with African countries on a pretty predictable sort of pattern,” said Ben Dalton, a program manager at New America’s Future Frontlines, a Washington-based research group.

“Normally it starts with a cultivation of elites, or at least a subset of elites, and then that is followed up with a formal military technical agreement between the states. And this could be something like, you know, Russia will supply arms in exchange for concessions that allow them to do mining or other kinds of resource extraction.”

Russia views Sudan as a strategic location with vast mineral wealth and is eager to help install a friendly leader, say analysts. 

“We’ve seen a lot in recent months about Russia’s efforts to gain a port on the Red Sea in Sudan through an official military relationship and they’ve signed other official military relationships with other countries in the region,” said Hudson.

Wagner’s involvement in other parts of the continent, however, has only brought strife to the population, Dalton said.

“Engaging with this group tends to go pretty badly for the population that has to deal with them. They’ve been associated with widespread atrocities everywhere they go; you see civilian deaths and various atrocities,” Dalton said. 

“Russia’s interests are in extracting the continent’s resources so that it can strengthen its own position and build a web to resist … international sanctions. They don’t really have the interests of Africans at heart.”

Patsy Widakuswara and Cindy Saine contributed to this report.
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