KHARTOUM, April 25 (Reuters) – Fighting in Sudan subsided on Tuesday as more foreigners and locals fled the capital Khartoum, where marauding fighters created what a UN agency called a “high biohazard risk” by seizing from a laboratory.
The World Health Organization said one of the warring parties had seized control of a national health center that stores measles and cholera pathogens for vaccines, and expelled the technicians.
He gave few details and did not say which side – the army or the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – had captured the laboratory, which also contains a major blood bank.
An exodus of embassies and aid workers from Africa’s third-largest country has raised fears that remaining civilians are in greater danger if an alternative to hostilities is not found before a shaky three-day truce ends on Thursday.
Yassir Arman, a leading figure in a civilian political coalition, the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC), urged humanitarian groups and the international community to help restore water and electricity, and send generators to hospitals.
“There are bodies strewn on the streets and sick people who cannot find medicine, water or electricity. People must be allowed to bury their dead during the ceasefire,” he said.
The UN humanitarian office (OCHA) said shortages of food, water, medicine and fuel were becoming extremely acute, with prices of basic goods, including bottled water, skyrocketing.
Has reduce activities due to fighting.
The UN refugee agency forecast that hundreds of thousands of people can flee to neighboring countries.
‘WHY IS THE WORLD LEAVING US?’
As foreign governments evacuated their nationals, those with nowhere to go said they I felt abandoned. They fear that fewer international observers could mean more bloodshed to come, and less respect for civilians.
“Why does the world abandon us in times of war?” said Sumaya Yassin, 27, accusing foreign powers of being selfish.
“The Sudanese fear that there may be unethical practices in the war against civilians and the use of civilians as human shields,” said a Khartoum man who gave his name as Ahmed.
“These are our fears after the evacuation of expatriates,” he said with a nod to Sudan’s long history of bloody civil wars.
Since fighting broke out on April 15, tens of thousands have fled to neighboring Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia and South Sudan, despite the uncertainty of conditions there.
With civilians leaving Khartoum in cars and buses, the streets of one of Africa’s largest metropolitan areas were largely emptied of ordinary daily life, with those still in the city huddled in their homes.
RSF fighters were visible in many parts of the city, with the army deployed in other areas.
“The situation has become very dangerous, even in areas that are not under shelling,” French journalist Augustine Passilly, who has worked in Sudan since 2020, said over a faulty phone line as she tried to cross the border into Egypt.
“There is nothing left in the stores, no water, no food. People have started to come out armed, with axes, with sticks”.
HUNDREDS DEAD
The fighting has turned residential areas into battlefields. Airstrikes and artillery shells have killed at least 459 people, injured more than 4,000, destroyed hospitals and limited food distribution in a nation already dependent on aid for a third of its 46 million people.
In a country that flanks the Red Sea, Horn of Africa and Sahel regions, violence risks a “catastrophic conflagration,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Monday.
Foreign countries have airlifted embassy staff after several attacks on diplomats, including the killing of an Egyptian attaché shot on his way to work.
Great Britain launched a large scale evacuation of its nationals on military flights from an airfield north of Khartoum. France and Germany said each had evacuated more than 500 people from various nationalitiesand that a French commando had been hit by crossfire during the operation.
Many Sudanese families used the break as an opportunity to find a means of transportation to get them to safety.
“Perhaps the most difficult moment is thinking about leaving the country,” said Intisar Mohammed El Haj, a Khartoum resident whose children had hidden under beds from the sound of the explosions before the family. fled to egypt.
Another resident reported that the bus fare to Egypt had increased six-fold, to $340.
LABORATORY TECHNICIANS OUTSIDE
Speaking to journalists in Geneva via video link from Sudan, the WHO Nima said Abid he said that armed men had thrown out the technicians from the National Public Health Laboratory.
“This is the main concern: there is no accessibility for lab technicians to go to the lab and safely contain the available biological material and substances,” he said.
RSF accused the army of violating the truce agreed on Monday – one of several that have quickly crumbled – and of attacking the position of its troops in the presidential palace.
A Reuters witness heard sporadic gunfire on Tuesday morning in the city of Omdurman, adjacent to the capital. Explosions were also reported in Bahri, on the other side of the Nile.
The Foreign Ministry said RSF had attacked diplomats, citing the assassination of the Egyptian attaché.
The Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) said the United States and Saudi Arabia negotiated the latest ceasefire.
Additional reporting by Kylie MacLellan in London and Kiyoshi Takenaka, Kantaro Komiya, Nobuhiro Kubo, Mariko Katsumura and Elaine Lies in Tokyo and Emma Farge in Bern; written by Michael Georgy; edited by Frank Jack Daniel
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