Aide to Sudanese army commander Abdel Fattah al-Burhan said the military was advancing along ten positions towards the central Gezira state, which is held by the rival Rapid Support Forces (RSF)
Yasser Abdul Rahman al-Ata said the advance has been taking place for four months and the military was also marching on Khartoum’s cities along three fronts.
He vowed thta the roads leading to Khartoum city will be reopened within days.
The RSF said on Thursday it has repelled all attacks waged by the army along several fronts in Gezira, dealing it heavy losses.
On Saturday, the RSF and its allied militias attacked towns west of al-Fashir city, the capital of the North Darfur state, said resistance committees in the city.
The RSF razed houses in the area, they added, while reporting heavy displacement of people.
Preliminary reports said five villages were attacked by the RSF and its allied groups. No official or unofficial reports were available about casualties.
Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch urged world leaders, who will meet to discuss Sudan in Paris on Monday, to “make clear that those responsible for ongoing atrocities and other violations of international humanitarian law will be held to account”.
“This includes widespread intentional killings of civilians, unlawful attacks on civilian infrastructure, as well as the deliberate looting of aid, which constitute war crimes,” it said, referring to the army and RSF.
On April 15, France alongside Germany and the European Union are cohosting a conference on Sudan to press for an end to the fighting and for a significant uptick in global funding for the grossly under-resourced response as a hunger and broader humanitarian crisis unravels in the country and in refugee hosting countries.
“The warring parties in Sudan have inflicted tremendous suffering on Sudanese from all walks of life. The global response to Sudan’s brutal conflict needs to change,” said Mohamed Osman, Sudan researcher at Human Rights Watch.
“Leaders meeting in Paris should act to tackle the shamefully low levels of humanitarian funding, including for local responders, and commit to concrete measures against those deliberately hampering aid delivery to populations in need,” he continued, according to an HRW statement on Saturday.
The conference comes a year after conflict broke out between the army and RSF in Khartoum on April 15, before spreading to other regions including Darfur and central Sudan. “Despite the magnitude of suffering and violations by the warring parties, the situation in Sudan has received an underwhelming response from the international community,” said HRW.
Almost 15,000 people are known to have been killed since then, almost certainly an underestimate. The conflict has uprooted 8.5 million people, most internally, making Sudan the world’s largest internal displacement crisis. Around 1.76 million people have fled into neighboring countries. Without significant humanitarian assistance, five million people could risk starvation in the coming months, it warned.
“Both warring parties have committed serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, amounting in some cases to war crimes and other atrocity crimes,” HRW said.
It stated that the army has “unlawfully killed civilians, carried out airstrikes that have deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure, and repeatedly obstructed humanitarian aid among other violations.”
“The RSF has carried out widespread civilian killings, many of which appear to be ethnically targeted notably in West Darfur, while also hampering aid including by widespread looting of humanitarian supplies,” it continued.
“They have used heavy explosive weapons in densely populated areas and engaged in widespread sexual violence and pillage. Both forces and their allies have recruited children and arbitrarily detained civilians.”
Rapid Support Forces and allied militias have repeatedly attacked and looted aid supplies and humanitarian infrastructure notably warehouses, such as the stocks in a World Food Program (WFP) warehouse in Wad Madani in December 2023, said HRW.
“This attack – in areas controlled by the Rapid Support Forces – affected supplies that could have fed 1.5 million acutely food-insecure people for one whole month,” the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) noted.
