The Sudanese military suspended their participation in talks with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on Wednesday, accusing the group of a lack of commitment and of continuously violating the existing ceasefire.
“The General Command of the Armed Forces has decided to suspend the current talks in Jeddah due to the rebel militia’s lack of commitment to the implementation [of] any of the terms of the agreement and its continuous violation of the ceasefire,” the military said in a statement carried by Sudanese media.
Brig. Nabil Abdalla, a spokesperson for the army, told US media that the decision was in response to “repeated violations” of the humanitarian ceasefire by the RSF, including their continued occupation of hospitals and other civilian infrastructure in Khartoum, the country’s capital and largest city.
Following the collapse of the talks, Sudanese artillery strikes were reported on RSF bases in several Sudanese cities. A day earlier, Sudanese leader Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan warned that the military would resort to “full lethal force” if the RSF “doesn’t respond to the voice of reason.”
Since the fighting began on April 14, more than 1,800 people have been killed. According to UN statistics, more than 1.2 million people have been displaced by the fighting, with the World Food Program providing aid to 782,000 people in Sudan in the last four weeks.
However, the country has been in political turmoil since late 2018, when a pro-democracy movement erupted that forced longtime military leader Omar al-Bashir from power the following year. After his ouster, a shared military-civilian interim government was formed and the protesters continued to clash with the RSF, which was sent to crush the mass movement. In October 2021, the Sudanese military ousted the civilian prime minister, Abdalla Hamdok, and Burhan took over, sparking a renewed civilian resistance movement.
A new power-sharing agreement was agreed to last December, but as the date neared for it to be signed, disagreements between Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the head of the RSF militia, began to harden and Dagalo criticized the ouster of Hamdok as a “mistake.”