JEDDAH: Heavy fighting raged across the Sudanese capital Khartoum on Tuesday as the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces shot down a Sudanese army fighter jet and artillery and machinegun fire rocked the city.
“We saw pilots jumping with parachutes as the plane plunged to the ground,” said one resident of northern Khartoum.
The paramilitaries said they “arrested the pilot after he landed with a parachute,” and accused the regular army of “heinous massacres” in greater Khartoum.
Residents in Omdurman, across the river from Khartoum’s city center, saw “heavy clashes using various types of weapons.”
Others saw airstrikes in the area of the state television building, where the paramilitaries had launched an attack this week and fired anti-aircraft weapons on Tuesday.
In this picture taken on September 23, 2017, Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitaries, gives a speech in South Darfur sate. (AFP)
The armed forces led by Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan have been fighting paramilitaries led by his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo since April 15, in a brutal conflict that has killed nearly 3,000 people and dis- placed millions, triggered ethnically motivated killings in the western region of Darfur, and threatened to become a protract- ed civil war.
The paramilitaries quickly took control of swaths of the capital and have brought in extra fight- ers from Darfur and Kordofan as the conflict deepened, transfer- ring them across bridges from Omdurman to Bahri and Khartoum, the other two cities that make up the wider capital across the confluence of the River Nile.
Medics warn the toll of dead and wounded is probably much higher than recorded figures, with many casualties unable to reach health facilities, two-thirds of which are out of service. About 2.2 million Sudanese have been displaced within the country and 645,000 have fled across borders.
