Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, is a war zone. “Things get worse every day and day,” said Mohamed Fath Alrahman, a doctor and general manager of Al-Nada Hospital in Khartoum.
Artillery shelling and airstrikes are the norm. The streets are not safe. There are food shortages. The health care system is collapsing. About 16 percent of hospitals in Khartoum are still functioning, according to the World Health Organization.
Al-Nada Hospital, a maternity hospital which is operated by the Sudanese American Physicians Association (SAPA), still has water and electricity and supplies, for now. It is a risk, though, for patients to leave home and seek care. Alrahman recalled a conversation with the husband of a pregnant woman, who told the doctor that, as he rushed his wife to the hospital to deliver their baby, his car was shot up.
“It is really, really a living hell,” Alrahman said.
Two men, and their respective militaries, are responsible for that living hell in Khartoum, and elsewhere in Sudan. Fighting erupted on April 15 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a powerful paramilitary group led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti.
The competing militaries are partially a legacy of the former Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir, who fractured the country’s security apparatus as a “coup-proofing” strategy to prevent any one faction from getting strong enough to depose him. That failed — after mass protests, the military ousted al-Bashir in 2019 — but the competing centers of power persisted.
Al-Burhan and Hemedti shared power with civilian leaders in Sudan’s transitional government, which was supposed to create a pathway to a democratic Sudan. But in 2021, the generals teamed up to oust the civilian leaders. The two shared a shaky partnership in government since, though they were recently negotiating a deal to transition back to civilian rule. Yet…
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