Cairo: New fighting rocked Sudan’s capital on Thursday with airstrikes and drone attacks in and around Khartoum amid a worsening cholera outbreak, officials said.
Sudan’s military launched an operation in the early hours of Thursday aimed at taking control of areas in the capital that had been in the hands of its enemy, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, or RSF.
Sudanese media reported increased military movements and airstrikes in the districts of Khartoum and Omdurman, the heaviest in the capital area in months. Mohamed Ibrahim, the health ministry’s spokesperson in Khartoum, said in a statement that four civilians were killed and 14 others wounded in the latest fighting in the Karrari district of Omdurman, a city next to the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. A military spokesman confirmed the operation was underway, but declined to comment further. A military spokesman confirmed the operation was underway, but declined to comment further.
The head of Sudan’s military, Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, addressed the UN General Assembly in New York, saying that “we’ve done everything we could to put an end to this war and to steer our country from the destruction being waged” by the militia.
He maintained that position when he spoke to reporters at the Sudanese Mission to the United Nations on Thursday evening. Sudan’s cholera outbreak jumped by nearly 100 or nearly 20 per cent in only two days, Sudan’s health ministry said Wednesday, in a worrying sign that the disease is spreading more rapidly.
A total of 473 people have died from cholera since the country’s rainy season began, health officials said.