Residents flee homes as Sudan’s rival forces battle for 5th day

Explosions and heavy gunfire rattled the Sudanese capital in a fifth day of fighting Wednesday after an internationally brokered truce quickly fell apart.

Explosions and heavy gunfire rattled the Sudanese capital in a fifth day of fighting Wednesday after an internationally brokered truce quickly fell apart. The cease-fire failure suggested the two rival generals fighting for control of the country were determined to crush each other in a potentially prolonged conflict.

With no sign of respite, desperate and terrified Sudanese who have been trapped for days in their homes by the violence raging on their doorsteps began to flee their homes, witnesses said. Residents of multiple neighborhoods of Khartoum told The Associated Press they could see hundreds, including women and children, carrying luggage, some leaving by foot, others crowding into vehicles.

“Khartoum has become a ghost city,” said Atiya Abdalla Atiya, secretary of the Doctors’ Syndicate, who is still in the capital.

The generals’ fight for power has caught millions of Sudanese in the crossfire, as their forces have battled it out since Saturday with heavy machine guns, artillery and airstrikes in residential neighborhoods of Khartoum, its neighboring city Omdurman and other major towns of the country.

At least 270 people have been killed the past five days, the U.N. said, but the toll is likely higher, since many bodies have been left in the streets, unreachable because of clashes.

A 24-hour cease-fire was to have been in effect from sundown Tuesday to sundown Wednesday. It was the most concrete attempt yet to bring a pause that it was hoped could be expanded into a longer truce.

It came after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke separately by phone with the two rivals _ the leader of the armed forces, Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan, and the head of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo. Egypt, which backs the Sudanese military, and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have close ties to the RSF, have also been calling on all sides to stand down.

But fighting continued after the intended start of the truce and through the night. Each side blamed the other for the failure.