Sudan in chaos: Former regime members escape prison

Sudan’s army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have clashed near the capital Khartoum and some other places amid reports of members of the former regime led by Omar al-Bashir fleeing prison.  

Now the fear is a truce hoped to ease tensions in an 11-day conflict could go down the drain.

On Wednesday, anti-aircraft guns targeted fighter jets over Khartoum's sister city of Omdurman, according to AFP, after the army launched airstrikes against rival paramilitary forces in the capital late Tuesday.

The two warring sides have blamed one another for starting the hostilities and for breaching the ceasefire, which is due to end Thursday.

Meantime, Ahmed Harun, a leading figure of the former regime, has escaped jail amid the mayhem.

Harun, who is wanted for alleged war crimes by the International Criminal Court over the Darfur conflict in the 2000s, said in a recorded TV address that he and fellow ex-regime members had broken out of the capital's Kober prison. It was unclear which side may have helped to free them, but the RSF claimed in a statement the conflict was "a cover" by "coup leaders" to "get the leaders of the deposed regime out of prison."

Bashir, 79, whose three-decade reign came to an end at the hands of the military following mass protests, had himself been held at Kober. But the army said he and several others had been transferred to a military hospital before fighting erupted on April 15 "due to their health conditions" and that they remained under judicial police guard.

Mass exodus

Foreign powers have evacuated thousands of diplomats and citizens in recent days, and Sudanese and citizens of neighbouring countries have been flooding out.

In continued evacuations, a ship carrying nearly 1,700 civilians from more than 50 countries docked in Saudi Arabia early Wednesday.

The United Nations said it has "received reports of tens of thousands of people arriving in the Central African Republic, Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, and South Sudan."

More than 10,000 people have crossed into Egypt from Sudan over the past five days, Cairo said, while an estimated 20,000 have entered Chad. Others have fled to South Sudan and Ethiopia, despite difficult conditions there.

The fighting has pitted the army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan against his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, head of the paramilitary RSF, which emerged from the militia that the Bashir government unleashed in Darfur.

Burhan and Daglo seized full power in a 2021 coup, but have now fallen out and gone to war, hurtling Sudan into deeper turmoil.

The fighting, which has involved airstrikes and artillery exchanges, has killed well over 450 people and wounded more than 4,000, UN agencies report. The deadly chaos has reduced some districts of greater Khartoum to ruins.

The UN representative to Sudan, Volker Perthes, told the Security Council that "both of the warring parties have fought with disregard for the laws and norms of war."

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