Last Saturday, at nine in the morning, Katharina von Schroeder and her eight-year-old son went to their school in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, as every week, to attend children's tennis classes. Minutes later, the war caught up with them. "The school was empty because it was the weekend," she explains over the phone, "and when we arrived we heard the sound of explosions and shots and we took refuge in the school."
Since then, Von Schroeder and his son, both of German nationality, in addition to ten other children with their parents, have been trapped in a school in the capital, Khartoum, which has been hosting serious clashes between the Sudanese army and the group for three days. paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (FAR).
The sudden eruption of the battle in Khartoum, which has left hundreds of people stranded in offices or schools, seeps through von Schroeder's phone: as he speaks, the incessant sound of multiple gunshots is heard.
“It's our third day at school, we sleep on mattresses in the gym. We are exhausted. Yesterday and the day before yesterday the battle was very hard, strong shelling was heard nearby and we ran to the basement to protect ourselves”, he explains.
From her school shelter, Von Schroeder, who works in Sudan as director of advocacy, communication and campaigns for Save the Children, denounces the terrible humanitarian impact that violence will have. In addition to the victims of these three days – almost 185 civilians and 45 soldiers killed and 1,800 wounded, according to the Sudanese Central Committee of Doctors – the fighting occurs when Sudan is facing the worst humanitarian crisis in its history, with conflicts, epidemics and economic degradation that have caused 15.8 million people (a third of the population) to need humanitarian aid.
For many analysts, the violent outbreak was seen coming. The conflict rocking Sudan is a power struggle between two of the country's most powerful generals: the head of the Sudanese armed forces, Abdel fatah al Burhan, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, alias Hemedti, leader of the FAR, whose origins they are the terrible Janjaweed militias, which perpetrated atrocities in Darfur.
Although both were at odds in the past, their current hatred stems from a recent pact: the two soldiers joined forces in 2021 to carry out a joint coup and end the democratic transition after a miraculous revolution. The people seemed to have achieved the impossible: two years earlier, massive popular protests toppled dictator Omar Al Bashir, in power since 1989, and laid the foundations for real democracy in Sudan. Both Hemedti and Burhan did not welcome this democratic opening of the country and conspired to avoid giving up power at the risk of losing economic privileges and being held accountable for their abuses. They didn't quite make it. Burhan's attempt to appoint a technocratic executive of his own to lead the country to an election ran into widespread popular opposition and a ferocious and isolated economic crisis.
From there, their rivalry resurfaced. The disagreement between the two generals on the future of the transition to a civilian government, and especially on who should lead the armed forces and the incorporation of the 100,000 FAR soldiers into the army, sounded the war drums.
For the Sudanese Mohammed Awad, director of the daily Al Yarida, the violence is due to a battle of cocks. “It is not a civil war, it is a military war between factions. Civil society is united and peaceful, our youth jailed Bashir, so this is a factional clash with no civil support.”
Although Awad believes that the outcome will be a matter of "a few days" due to the air superiority of the Sudanese army, he believes that if Hemedti manages to flee to Darfur, a new war phase will begin. "There it will be very difficult to stop him, and I think we will lose the region, but also the Russian Wagner mercenaries are in the Central African Republic and Darfur and Hemedti's relations with Russia have grown closer and are suspect."
One detail: on the eve of the start of the Ukrainian war, Hemtedi was in Moscow.
