Fighting mars Sudan's shaky truce as ex-regime members flee prison Agence France-Presse

KHARTOUM, Sudan -- A Sudanese war crimes suspect has escaped jail amid heavy battles that have rocked the country, along with other members of the Islamist regime ousted in 2019, heightening fears for a fragile ceasefire amid new clashes Wednesday. Anti-aircraft guns targeted fighter jets over Khartoum's sister city of Omdurman, witnesses told AFP, after the army launched air strikes against rival paramilitary forces in the capital late Tuesday. Amid the chaos -- which has killed hundreds, sparked a mass flight of terrified foreigners and Sudanese citizens, and deepened a humanitarian crisis -- Ahmed Harun, a leading figure of the regime of deposed dictator Omar al-Bashir, said he had escaped prison. Harun, who led the regime's infamous counter-insurgency campaign in the western Darfur region in the mid-2000s and is wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, said he had broken out of the capital's Kober prison. After being trapped in the empty jail in "the crossfire of this current battle", Harun said in a recorded TV address that he and fellow ex-regime members had taken "our protection in our own hands". The fighting has pitted army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan against his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, head of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which emerged from the Janjaweed militia that Bashir unleashed in Darfur. The Darfur conflict left some 300,000 dead and 2.5 million displaced, according to the UN. It was unclear which side may have helped to free the former regime members, but an RSF statement early Wednesday claimed the conflict was "a cover" by "coup leaders" to "get the leaders of the deposed regime out of prison". Multiple foreign governments have frantically organized road convoys, aircraft and ships to get thousands of their nationals out of Sudan, and citizens have fled overland to neighboring countries. The UN said it has "received reports of tens of thousands of people arriving in the Central African Republic, Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, and South Sudan". - 'Disregard for norms of war' - Bashir, 79, who was ousted by the military in 2019 in the wake of mass pro-democracy protests, had himself been held in Kober prison. But the army said he and others had been transferred to a military hospital before fighting erupted on April 15 "due to their health conditions", and that they remained under judicial police guard. The military toppled Islamist-backed Bashir in April 2019 following civilian mass protests that raised hopes for a transition to democracy. Burhan and Daglo seized full power in a 2021 coup, but have now fallen out and gone to war, hurtling Sudan into deeper turmoil. The fighting, which has involved air strikes and artillery exchanges, has killed at least 459 people and wounded more than 4,000, UN agencies report, and reduced some districts of greater Khartoum to ruins. The UN representative to Sudan, Volker Perthes, told the UN Security Council that "both of the warring parties have fought with disregard for the laws and norms of war". Perthes, who has stayed in Sudan, said they have been "attacking densely populated areas with little consideration for civilians, for hospitals, or even for vehicles transferring the wounded and sick". - Hospitals shelled - A UN report warned that "shortages of food, water, medicines and fuel are becoming extremely acute, especially in Khartoum and surrounding areas". "Why didn't the officials care for the Sudanese people and their suffering?" said one resident, Alnour Mohamed Ahmed, a builder. "People can't leave their homes." A total of 14 hospitals have been shelled, the doctors' union said Wednesday, while 19 others are out of service. "In some places, humanitarian aid is all that is keeping famine at bay," UN chief Antonio Guterres said Tuesday. In continued evacuations, a ship carrying nearly 1,700 civilians from more than 50 countries docked in Saudi Arabia early Wednesday, and Britain airlifted nationals to Cyprus. The two warring sides have blamed one another for starting the hostilities and for breaching the ceasefire, which is due to end Thursday, and both have made unverifiable claims to control key sites. The RSF claimed to be in control of an oil refinery and the associated Garri power plant more than 70 kilometers (40 miles) north of Khartoum. The army had earlier warned in a Facebook post of a "heavy movement" towards the site "in order to take advantage of the truce by taking control of the refinery". Security fears were further heightened when the World Health Organization warned that combatants had occupied a Khartoum laboratory holding samples of cholera, measles, polio, spelling a "huge biological risk". On Thursday, WHO officials said a team in Sudan was carrying out an "extensive risk assessment". © Agence France-Presse