One month since Sudan’s conflict erupted, its capital is a desolate war zone where terrorised families huddle in their homes as gun battles rage in the dusty, deserted streets outside.
Across Khartoum, those still alive remain barricaded, hoping to dodge stray bullets and enduring desperate shortages of food and basic supplies.
There are power blackouts, a lack of cash, communications outages, and runaway inflation.
The city of five million on the Nile River 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.
Charred aircraft lie on the airport tarmac, foreign embassies are shuttered and hospitals, banks, shops and wheat silos have been ransacked by looters.
While the generals fight, what remains of the government has retreated to Port Sudan 850 kilometres (528 miles) away, the hub for mass evacuations of both Sudanese and foreign citizens.
The battles have killed more than 750 people, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project. Thousands more have been wounded and nearly a million people displaced, with long refugee convoys headed to Egypt, Ethiopia, Chad and South Sudan.
Some food prices have quadrupled, and petrol now sells at 20 times its pre-war price.
Multiple truce deals have been agreed and quickly violated, and hopes are dim for an end to the fighting which has piled more suffering on the 45 million people of one of the world’s poorest countries.
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.
History of coups
Sudan has a long history of coups, but hopes had risen after mass pro-democracy protests led to the ouster of Islamist-backed Bashir in 2019,…
