Sudan fighting kills over 100 in Darfur, ceasefire talks stall

At least 100 people have been killed in clashes that erupted last month between armed fighters in a city in Sudan’s restive region of Darfur, as the East African country enters its fourth week of gun battles and air strikes in the capital.

Hospitals were still out of service in the Darfur city of Genena and an accurate count of the wounded was still hard to make, Sudan’s Doctors Syndicate said in a statement posted on their official Facebook page late on Sunday.

The fighting in Genena, which broke out a few days after Sudan’s two rival generals took arms against each other in Khartoum, pointed to the possibility that conflict in the capital could spiral to other parts of the country.

At least 481 civilians were killed in Khartoum clashes between the military, led by General Abdel Fattah Al Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, according to the same doctors’ statement.

The number of wounded in Khartoum, among civilians, has jumped to more than 2560.

Humanitarian crisis

The numbers came as UN's top aid official Martin Griffiths was in Saudi Arabia on Sunday for ceasefire talks between Sudan's warring generals, as concern grows for the humanitarian situation.

Multiple truce deals have been declared, without effect, since fighting erupted between the army and paramilitary forces on April 15 in the poverty-stricken country with a history of political instability.

Fierce combat since then has killed hundreds of people, most of them civilians, wounded thousands and sparked multiple warnings of a "catastrophic" humanitarian crisis.

More than 100,000 people have already fled the country.

At least 700 people have been killed in the fighting, which has spread beyond Khartoum to Darfur and elsewhere, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.