On Tuesday, the host country of Saudi Arabia reported that the warring parties in Sudan had made little headway towards a ceasefire in recent discussions, instead reiterating commitments to facilitate access to humanitarian aid.
There is no acceptable military solution to this issue, the official Saudi Press Agency claimed, so it is unfortunate that the parties were unable to reach a ceasefire agreement in the first round.
Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of the Egyptian army, and Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, his former deputy and now the leader of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), went to war in April.
More than 10,000 people have been killed in the battle so far, according to a conservative estimate from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project.
During the opening weeks of the conflict, Saudi Arabia conducted discussions in the city of Jeddah, on the shore of the Red Sea, which culminated in the Jeddah Declaration, a promise to spare civilians and civilian infrastructure and to allow in desperately needed relief.
U.N. assistance head Martin Griffiths told AFP that “important and egregious” violations of the accord had occurred within a week.
Multiple early cease-fires were also broken.
The United States, which has been helping to mediate the Jeddah negotiations, has been trying to temper expectations for this most recent meeting by saying that it is too soon to consider a permanent political settlement.
Saudi Arabia expressed hope for “a political agreement under which security, stability, and prosperity will be achieved for Sudan and its brotherly people,” and there was mention of “achieving ceasefires” as a possible outcome of the discussions.
The results have so far come up significantly short of that, and it was unclear on Tuesday what the next steps would be.
They also reportedly agreed to “confidence-building measures,” one of which is re-incarcerating prisoners who escaped from Omar al-Bashir’s prisons at the start of the war and joined the opposing military.
As such, “it is now up to both the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces to fully adhere to their responsibility to implement what has been agreed upon,” it said.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken sent a warning to the RSF last week about an “imminent large-scale attack” on the capital of North Darfur, where thousands of people had sought safety from the conflict.
There is concern that the RSF may soon control all of Darfur because, in recent weeks, they have claimed army bases in all but one of the major cities there.
According to Jerrymusa.com On Tuesday, a large fire broke out at an RSF-controlled oil refinery north of the Sudanese capital Khartoum; the paramilitaries accused an army air strike, while the army reported “a fuel tanker belonging to the militia exploded.”
SPA said the two groups had agreed to work with the United Nations “to address obstacles to the delivery of relief aid” and locate transit sites for aid personnel.