Local media reported that artillery fire could be heard in the morning.

Earlier on Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, said that representatives of the Sudanese army and the rival paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, RSF, had agreed on a seven-day ceasefire.

While similar agreements had failed to hold in the past, this time both sides had signed the agreement, Blinken said.

In addition, a monitoring mechanism supported by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia would be set up to report violations of the ceasefire.

Both sides declared their intention to comply with the agreement.

A long-simmering power struggle escalated violently in the country on the Horn of Africa on April 15.

The army under the command of de facto President, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, is fighting against the paramilitary units of his deputy Mohammed Hamdan Daglo.

The two generals seized power together in 2021, but later fell out.

Source: dpa/NAN

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A joint US-Saudi statement welcomed the start of “pre-negotiation talks” in Jeddah between the Sudanese army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

On Friday reports spoke of continuing clashes in Khartoum.

The Sudanese army says the talks aim to address humanitarian issues.

There has been no official RSF comment.

The army confirmed it had sent envoys to Jeddah to engage in the talks, which the UN and aid agencies have been pressing for, faced with a dire humanitarian crisis in Sudan.

Nearly three weeks of heavy fighting have killed hundreds of people and displaced nearly 450,000 civilians.

Of that total, the International Organization for Migration says, more than 115,000 have sought refuge in neighbouring countries.

Sudan’s army commander Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan – the de facto Sudanese president – is engaged in a bitter power struggle with RSF leader Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti.

The statement from the US and Saudi governments said they “urge both parties to take in consideration the interests of the Sudanese nation and its people and actively engage in the talks towards a ceasefire and end to the conflict, which will spare the Sudanese people’s suffering and ensure the availability of humanitarian aid to affected areas”.

The joint statement also expressed hope for “an expanded negotiation process that should include engagement with all Sudanese parties”.

A Unicef spokesman, James Elder, said the conflict’s first 11 days alone had killed an estimated 190 children and wounded 1,700 – and those figures were just from health facilities in Khartoum and Darfur.

“The reality is likely to be much worse,” he said.

The intensity of the fighting has prevented much-needed aid deliveries getting through.

So far Gen Burhan and Hemedti, who led an Arab militia in the brutal Darfur conflict, have shown little readiness to reach a peace settlement.

Source: BBC

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Artillery fire was also heard in the neighbouring town of Omdurman, according to eyewitness reports on Twitter.

The week-long ceasefire agreed to by both factions in the Sudanese conflict was supposed to be in effect from Thursday until May 11.

However, chances that it would hold had been considered slim.

Since the fighting began in Sudan between military factions loyal to two top generals nearly three weeks ago, ceasefires of up to 72 hours have been repeatedly negotiated only to be repeatedly broken.

Sudan’s de facto president, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, is leading the military in a power struggle against his former deputy, Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, who heads the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

The two generals had once seized control of Sudan together in joint military coups.

However, repeated disagreements about how to share power led to a deepening rift between the two camps, which culminated in open fighting on April 15 and plunged the country with its around 46 million inhabitants into a grave crisis.

Source: dpa/NAN

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The statement comes days after the president of South Sudan, Salva Kiir, began mediating between the two sides, as the representative of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, IGAD, a regional alliance.

Kiir seeks to bring an end to the fighting between the forces of Sudan’s de facto president Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and those of his deputy, Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, who leads the RSF.

Al-Burhan and Daglo agreed to name representatives for negotiations to be held in South Sudan’s capital Juba, the statement said.

No date for the start of the negotiations has yet been set, the ministry said.

The rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation makes de-escalation of the conflict imperative, it said.

Several 72-hour ceasefires have been called since fighting broke out on April 15, but these have been broken repeatedly.

At the end of last week, the Ministry of Health reported around 530 dead and some 4,600 injured as a result of the fighting.

In the chaos of the fighting, however, it is difficult for the authorities to keep an overview, and the true numbers are thought to be far higher.

Meanwhile the UN International Organisation for Migration, IOM, said at least 334,000 people had become internally displaced in Sudan since the violence broke out.

An IOM spokesman said that the majority of them, around 240,000 people, were displaced in the areas of South and West Darfur, in the west of the country.

Even before the recent clashes began, there were 3.7 million people displaced in Sudan due to previous conflicts.

Meanwhile, the number of people from Sudan seeking refuge in neighbouring countries has exceeded 100,000, according to the UN refugee agency UNHCR.

Many have arrived in Chad, South Sudan, and Egypt.

Among them are Sudanese, but also refugees from other countries who had found shelter in Sudan.

“UNHCR, with governments and partners, is preparing for the possibility that over 800,000 people may flee the fighting in Sudan for neighbouring countries,” UNHCR chief, Filippo Grandi, tweeted on Monday.

“We hope it doesn’t come to that,” he added.

Al-Burhan has been fighting his deputy Daglo with the help of the military since April 15.

The two generals took over the leadership of the country of about 46 million through two military coups in 2019 and 2021.

Hundreds of people have been killed since the fighting began.

Governments from across the world have launched evacuation missions to airlift their citizens to safety.

The United States has evacuated more than 700 people from Sudan over the past three days, the U.S. State Department said on Monday.

Three U.S. convoys had arrived in Port Sudan on the Red Sea since Saturday, taking more than 700 U.S. citizens, their families and nationals from allied and partner countries to safety, a department spokesman told a media briefing.

“This successful operation would not have been possible without the dedication and bravery of our locally employed staff who facilitated the movements from Khartoum during an arduous overland journey to Port Sudan,” he said.

Since the beginning of the fighting in mid-April, the U.S. had taken more than 1,000 of its citizens out of Sudan to safety, the spokesman said.

Embassy staff and their families were evacuated directly from Khartoum by the U.S. military.

“We are working tirelessly and around the clock to ensure those who have sought our assistance in Sudan that they are aware of all options for evacuation.”

Source: dpa/NAN

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It is the fourth effort to stop the fighting which began on 15 April, with previous truces not observed.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the 72-hour truce had been agreed between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, RSF, after 48 hours of negotiations.

The latest ceasefire attempt started at midnight (22:00 GMT on Monday).

There have also been reports of warplanes flying over Khartoum, but civilians are back on the streets of the capital.

At least 459 people have died in the conflict so far, though the actual number is thought to be much higher.

Both sides have confirmed they will cease hostilities.

But Tagreed Abdin, who lives 7km from the centre of Khartoum, said she could hear shelling from her home on Tuesday morning despite the agreement.

“The situation right now is that this morning there was shelling and gunfire,” she told the BBC.

“Obviously the ceasefire hasn’t taken,” she added.

In other developments, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned there is a “high risk of biological hazard” after fighters seized a laboratory believed to be holding samples of diseases including polio and measles.

Since the violence began, residents of Khartoum have been told to stay inside, and food and water supplies have been running low.

The bombing has hit key infrastructure, like water pipes, meaning that some people have been forced to drink from the River Nile.

Countries have scrambled to evacuate their diplomats and civilians as fighting raged in central, densely populated parts of the capital.

There will be hopes the ceasefire will allow civilians to leave the city.

Foreign governments will also hope it will allow for continued evacuations out of the country.

Egypt’s foreign ministry said on Monday that an attaché had been killed while driving to the embassy in Khartoum to help with the evacuation of Egyptian citizens.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell also confirmed on Monday that more than 1,000 EU citizens had been evacuated.

South Africa, Kenya and Uganda are among the African nations to have announced the evacuation of their citizens.

The UK government has announced it will begin evacuating British passport holders and immediate family members from Tuesday.

On Monday, Mr Blinken said that some convoys trying to move people out had encountered “robbery and looting”.

The US, he added, was looking at potentially resuming its diplomatic presence in Sudan but he described the conditions there as “very challenging”.

Hospitals in Sudan are running out of key supplies and struggling to cope, according to secretary general of Sudan Doctors Union Dr Atia Abdalla Atia.

The country also suffered an “internet blackout” on Sunday amid the fighting but connectivity has since been partially restored, according to monitoring group NetBlocks.

The UN is bracing for up to 270,000 people to flee Sudan into neighbouring South Sudan and Chad.

Hassan Ibrahim, 91, is among those to have already fled the country.

The retired physician lives near the main airport in Khartoum, where some of the worst fighting has taken place, but has since made the perilous journey into neighbouring Egypt with his family.

He told the BBC World Service’s Newshour programme they had escaped being caught up in a firefight between RSF fighters and the army but that a van travelling behind them had got hit.

The family then boarded a bus to the border, which took 12 hours, only for them to be met by “crowded and chaotic” scenes as people waited to be given entry.

“There were so many families with elderly passengers, children and babies,” said Mr Ibrahim. “The Sudanese are fleeing the country – it is a sad reality.”

Eiman ab Garga, a British-Sudanese gynaecologist who works in the UK, was visiting the capital with her children when the fighting began and has just been evacuated to Djibouti on a flight organised by France.

Her hurried departure meant that she was not able to say goodbye to her ailing father, her mother or her sister.

“The country is dirty, there’s rubbish all over it,” she told BBC Radio 4’s World Tonight programme. “There’s sewage overflowing, it smells, so now we’re next going to have an outbreak of illness and disease, and there won’t be a hospital to go to there.”

“We’re just looking at death and destruction and destitution.”

Violence broke out primarily in Khartoum, between rival military factions battling for control of Africa’s third largest country.

This came after days of tension as members of the RSF were redeployed around the country in a move that the army saw as a threat.

Since a 2021 coup, Sudan has been run by a council of generals, led by the two military men at the centre of this dispute – Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of the armed forces and in effect the country’s president, and his deputy and leader of the RSF, Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti.

They have disagreed on the direction the country is going in and the proposed move towards civilian rule.

The main sticking points are plans to include the 100,000-strong RSF into the army, and who would then lead the new force.

Gen Dagalo has accused Gen Burhan’s government of being “radical Islamists” and that he and the RSF were “fighting for the people of Sudan to ensure the democratic progress for which they have so long yearned”.

Many find this message hard to believe, given the brutal track record of the RSF.

Gen Burhan has said he supports the idea of returning to civilian rule, but that he will only hand over power to an elected government.

Source: BBC

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This happened after the army deployed on foot for the first time in its almost week-long fight with a paramilitary force.

Soldiers and gunmen from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces shot at each other in the north, west, and centre of the city, including during the call for special early morning Eid prayers, witnesses said.

The unabated fighting has killed hundreds.

In the absence of a ceasefire, foreign nations including the United States have been unable to evacuate their citizens from Sudan.

International efforts to broker a temporary truce over the three-day holiday and allow civilians to reach safety have so far failed.

Instead, the army appeared to enter a new phase of the battle on the ground, fighting the RSF in residential neighbourhoods, after having stuck largely to air strikes across the capital, with fiercer clashes in central Khartoum.

Army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan said on Thursday he saw “no other option but the military solution” to the power struggle with the paramilitary force that erupted into violence last weekend.

The conflict between two previously allied leaders of the ruling military junta, army chief Burhan and RSF leader General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, risks drawing in Sudan’s neighbours and could play into regional competition between Russia and the United States.

The thud of heavy weaponry could be heard across Khartoum and its Nile sister cities, together with one of Africa’s biggest urban areas.

Army troops brandishing semi-automatic weapons were greeted by cheers on one street, footage released by the military on Friday showed.

Reuters verified the location of the video, in the north of the city, but could not immediately verify when it was filmed.

The World Health Organisation said at least 413 people have already been killed and thousands injured in the conflict, which has tipped Sudan into a humanitarian disaster, with hospitals under attack and up to 20,000 people fleeing into neighbouring Chad.

Thousands more Sudanese fled Khartoum on Friday, moving south to Al Gezira state, or north to River Nile state, with some seeking to go onward to Egypt.

Even before the conflict, about a quarter of Sudan’s people were facing acute hunger, with children especially affected.

The UN World Food Programme halted its Sudan operation, one of its largest, on Saturday after three of its workers were killed.

The violence was triggered by disagreement over an internationally backed plan to form a new civilian government four years after the fall of autocrat Omar al-Bashir to mass protests, and two years after a military coup.

Both sides accuse the other of thwarting the transition.

Source: Reuters/NAN

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