Fighters rampage in Darfur city

Cairo: Armed fighters rampaged through a main city in Sudan’s war-ravaged region of Darfur on Thursday, battling each other and looting shops and homes, residents said. The violence came despite a fragile three-day truce between Sudan’s two top generals whose power struggle has killed hundreds.

The mayhem in the Darfur city of Genena pointed to how the rival generals’ fight for control in the capital, Khartoum, was spiraling into violence in other parts of Sudan.

The cease-fire has brought a significant easing of fighting in Khartoum and its neighboring city Omdurman for the first time since the military and a rival paramilitary force began clashing on April 15, turning residential neighborhoods into battlegrounds.

The relative calm has allowed foreign governments to airlift out hundreds of citizens, while tens of thousands of Sudanese have streamed out of Khartoum, seeking safer areas or escape abroad.

An East African initiative was pressing to extend the truce, which was due to run out Thursday night, for another three days.

The head of the military, Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan, said he had accepted the proposal, but there was no immediate word from his rival, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, commander of the Rapid Support Forces.

Even in the capital, fighting has not stopped, residents said. In the western region of Darfur, residents said the violence was escalating to its worst yet.

Darfur has been a battleground between the military and the paramilitary RSF since the conflict began in mid-month.

In the city of Genena, the provincial capital of West Darfur, one of the region’s five provinces, residents said the fighting was now dragging in tribal militias, tapping into longtime hatreds between the region’s two main communities one that identifies as Arab, the other as East or Central African.

In the early 2000s, Darfur was scene of an insurgency by African tribes which had long complained of discrimination.

The Khartoum government responded with a military campaign that rights groups have called genocidal, deploying Arab militias known as the Janjaweed who were accused of widespread killings, rapes and atrocities. The Janjaweed later evolved into the RSF.

Early Thursday, fighters who mostly wore RSF uniforms attacked several neighborhoods across Genena, driving many families from their homes.

The violence then spiraled with tribal fighters joining the fray in Genena, a city of around a half million people located near the border

with Chad.