No End Near in Sudan Conflict

Fighting continued Monday morning, with loud explosions heard across Khartoum and thick smoke billowing in the sky while warplanes flying overhead drew anti-aircraft fire, according to witnesses.

"The situation is becoming worse by the day," said a 37-year-old resident of southern Khartoum who did not wish to be named.

"People are getting more and more scared because the two sides... are becoming more and more violent."

Khartoum, a city of five million, was long a place of relative stability and wealth, even under decades of sanctions against former strongman Omar al-Bashir.

Now it has become a shell of its former self.

As people hope to dodge stray bullets, they also endure desperate shortages of food and basic supplies, power blackouts, communications outages and runaway inflation.

The fighting broke out on April 15 between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who leads the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

The battles have killed more than 750 people, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, with thousands more wounded and nearly a million displaced.

Multiple truce deals have been violated, and hopes are dim for an end to the fighting.

Both sides "break ceasefires with a regularity that demonstrates a sense of impunity unprecedented even by Sudan's standards of civil conflict," said Alex Rondos, the European Union's former special representative to the Horn of Africa.

In their latest moves, Burhan declared that he was freezing the RSF's assets, while Dagalo threatened in an audio recording that the army chief would be "brought to justice and hanged" in a public square.

Despite the bullets, aerial bombardments and anti-aircraft fire of recent weeks, neither side has been able to seize the battlefield advantage.

The army, backed by Egypt, has the advantage of air power while Dagalo is, according to experts, supported by the United Arab Emirates and foreign fighters.

For now, "both sides believe that they can win militarily," U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told a recent Senate hearing.

The fighting has deepened the humanitarian crisis in Sudan, where one in three people already relied on humanitarian assistance before the war.

Across the Red Sea, in the Saudi city of Jeddah, envoys from both sides have been negotiating.

By May 11 they had signed a commitment to respect humanitarian principles, including the protection of civilians and allowing in badly needed aid.

But, "absent a significant change of mindset from the warring parties, it is hard to see that commitments on paper will be fulfilled," said Aly Verjee, a Sudan researcher at Sweden's University of Gothenburg.

With hospitals gutted, "there are also reports of people dying from the injuries they sustained in the early days of fighting," said Mohamed Osman of Human Rights Watch.

Doctors Without Borders said food shortages in Darfur displacement camps mean "people have gone from three meals a day to just one."

Verjee said the fighting across the country has caused "the partial de-industrialization of Sudan".

"This means that any future Sudan will be much poorer for much longer."