Agreement reached by opposing groups in Sudan to halt the fighting

The Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), an East African organisation managing the crisis, declared on Sunday that the competing Sudanese factions that have been fighting one other bloodily since mid-April have decided to call off their hostilities.

General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) promised to meet in person with General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, the head of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), according to IGAD.

According to a statement released on X (previously Twitter), advisor to Djiboutian President Ismail Omar Guelleh, Alexis Mohammed stated that the decision was made during a summit held in Djibouti on Saturday.

According to Mohammed, the RSF chief Hemedti agreed to the ceasefire plan and a meeting with General Burhan over the phone with the Djiboutian leader, who is currently serving as the IGAD chairman and is hosting the summit.

“The principle of meeting within 15 days in order to pave the way for a series of confidence-building measures between the two parties that lead to the launch of a political process” was also acknowledged by the opposing sides in the Sudanese conflict, he continued.

The UN reported last week that over 12,000 people had died in fighting between the SAF and RSF, which has been going on for almost eight months, and that an estimated 6.6 million people had fled their homes.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) declared in a statement that 1,300 people had died in Sudan between October 28 and November 24, calling the nation “the country with the largest number of displaced people and the largest child displacement crisis in the world.”

Waves of massacres have broken out in the West Darfur region as a result of the fighting that broke out in the capital, Khartoum, taking on an ethnic dimension.

The UN has frequently charged paramilitary groups in West Darfur with the murder of hundreds of ethnic Masalits and the interment of some of them in mass graves. In Ardamata, a community close to the Sudanese army base in West Darfur, the RSF detained hundreds of individuals, including eighty children, according to an OCHA report on Thursday.

The US came to the conclusion on Friday that there had been war crimes committed by both parties.

All claims, even the one about ethnic cleansing in Darfur, have been refuted by the RSF. War crimes have also been rejected by the army.

Each side has charged the other of murdering civilians and breaking earlier humanitarian ceasefires.

Army Chief Burhan called the RSF “barbaric attacks” during discussions on Saturday in Djibouti, but he also stated that the army was willing to work towards a peaceful resolution.

The war “was imposed on the RSF and the people of Sudan by the terror-driven former regime and its allies within the SAF,” according to a statement released by General Hemedti on Monday.

But he went on to say that the RSF is willing to work with the regional bloc and the international community to end the conflict, solve the underlying causes of “Sudan’s wars and establish a new democratic state,” and accept the findings of the IGAD summit.

President Omar al-Bashir, who had ruled Sudan for thirty years, was overthrown in a military coup in 2019 thanks to the army’s collaboration with a paramilitary group in the country. A proposal to integrate troops as part of the landlocked African nation’s shift from military to civilian leadership has suddenly put both forces at odds.