Sudan updates: Supply shortages becoming ‘extremely acute’ – UN

Sudanese ex-official Ahmed Haroun, who served under Omar al-Bashir and is wanted by the International Criminal Court, said that he and other former officials of al-Bashir’s government had left Kober prison and would take responsibility for their own protection, in a statement aired on Sudan’s Tayba TV on Tuesday.

Haroun also said they were ready to appear in front of the judiciary whenever it was functioning.

The statement comes after reports that prisoners at Kober prison, which held Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and other top deputies, had staged a break earlier this week.

It was not immediately clear if al-Bashir, who has spent extended periods in a military hospital, was at the prison.

Humanitarian organisations say operations are at a standstill as they look to resume work in some areas of Sudan.

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Using buses, more than 1,600 Turkish citizens have been transported to Ethiopia from Sudan, Turkish diplomatic sources have told state-run Anadolu Agency.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs’s efforts to evacuate Turkish citizens from Sudan to Turkey via Ethiopia continue, reportedly said the sources, who asked not to be named due to restrictions on speaking to the media.

They were quoted by the agency as saying that the Turkish citizens were first transferred from the Sudanese-Ethiopian border to the airport in the border city of Gondar, before flying to Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa.

US President Joe Biden’s national security team is continuing to talk to military leaders from both sides of the Sudan conflict to support a durable end to the fighting there, White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre has said.

The United States is working with partners and Sudanese civilian groups to work toward a permanent ceasefire and humanitarian arrangements, she also said at a news briefing.

The US Department of State says Washington is continuing to press to extend the ceasefire in Sudan, including by coordinating with regional and international partners to assist in forming a committee to oversee negotiations.

Department of State deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel told reporters the United States wants to help the warring factions identify a path to a sustainable cessation of hostilities through its engagements with Sudan’s military and civilian leaders.

Patel added the Department of State, in an advisory, indicated to private American citizens in Sudan that if they can make it to Port Sudan and get to Jeddah via ferry, consular officers in Jeddah are available to assist them.

A spokesperson for Cyprus’s foreign ministry says the first British civilians evacuated from Sudan arrived on the island, airlifted out by the United Kingdom after warring factions agreed to a 72-hour ceasefire.

A passenger plane with about 40 civilians on board landed at Cyprus’s Larnaca airport, the spokesperson said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said Sudan, which is currently embroiled in a conflict between rival factions, had the right to use the services of Russian private military company Wagner Group.

Lavrov made his comments during a news conference at the United Nations.

The US is confident it can exert influence in Sudan to push the warring parties to end the fighting, a White House spokesperson has said, stressing that Washington is working with partners in the region to stop the violence.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, White House national security spokesperson John Kirby stressed that Washington will remain involved to find a resolution to the crisis.

“We’re pretty confident that we can have an influence here,” Kirby said, noting that the US helped broker the current ceasefire.

“We’ve got a stake here; we’ve got an interest at the table, and we’re going to continue to use that and the United State’s convening power to try to get these two sides together to get the violence down.”

Countries including France and Germany have helped evacuate about 100 Canadians from Sudan, and Canada is working to evacuate more civilians during a 72-hour ceasefire agreed by warring factions in the North African country, according to Canada’s Foreign Minister Melanie Joly.

The Canadian evacuees were from a group of 550 people who requested assistance, Joly told reporters in Ottawa, adding that the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia also helped with the evacuations. There are a total of 1,700 Canadians in Sudan who are registered at the foreign ministry.

US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby has said that the first goal for the United States is to decrease the violence in Sudan.

“We want to see that happen as soon as possible and that is why the ceasefire is important,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that getting humanitarian aid into the country comes next.

He said: “But clearly we want to see a transition to civilian authority inside Sudan. That is what the Sudanese people said they want and we want to support their aspirations.”

Al Jazeera’s Hiba Morgan, reporting from Khartoum, has said that there are areas in the Sudanese capital where the ceasefire held and some others where it did not.

She said that heavy clashes are reported in the vicinity of the presidential palace and the general command of the army.

“A hospital was hit in the city of Omdurman [north of Khartoum] following an artillery strike; at least a dozen people have been injured and the hospital was closed,” she said, adding that patients and the injured were evacuated to another hospital 3km (2miles) away.

The first British evacuation flight from Sudan has departed and two more are expected overnight, according to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s spokesperson.

The spokesperson added that the government was examining alternative evacuation routes including looking at using the Port of Sudan.

The UN humanitarian office has said supply shortages around the Sudanese capital were worsening and prices for basic goods were skyrocketing.

“After 10 days of fighting, shortages of food, water, medicines and fuel are becoming extremely acute, especially in Khartoum and surrounding areas,” the OCHA said in a statement.

It also cited reports that the cost of basic goods had surged, saying prices for bottled water had doubled, and said cash was scarce and hard to access.

Al Jazeera’s Hassan Razzaq, reporting from Omdurman, has said the major city in the north of Khartoum is still relatively safer than the capital.

“There is no displacement here … at least in the areas we have been to,” he said, adding that clashes and lack of police presence discourage people from leaving their homes.

“Every now and then, on an intermittent basis, we can hear anti-aircraft missiles and artillery bombardments, as well as warplanes,” Razzaq also said.

“Public buildings and facilities have not suffered a great deal of damage due to fires or strikes, as opposed to those in Khartoum,” Al Jazeera correspondent added.

Karl Schembri, the regional media adviser for East Africa and Yemen at the Norwegian Refugee Council, said that people are resorting to desperate measures to escape the conflict.

He told Al Jazeera from Nairobi that people are walking dozens of kilometres in various directions to escape the fighting in the capital.

“Many people are exhausted and tired, looking for safe areas around the country, like Wad Madani, which are thankfully away from fighting,” Schembri said.

Germany will conduct its last evacuation flight from Sudan to Jordan on Tuesday evening, with no further flights planned from the region for the time being, the foreign and defence ministries have said in a joint statement.

German nationals remaining in Sudan will be evacuated by partner nations in the coming days, the ministries added.

The UN refugee agency is making plans for hundreds of thousands of people spilling over Sudan’s borders to escape violence, according to officials.

UNHCR officials told a Geneva briefing they are poised for 270,000 people to flee across Sudan’s borders – a preliminary planning figure that includes Sudanese refugees crossing into South Sudan and Chad, as well as South Sudanese returning home.

The estimate so far only covers two of Sudan’s seven neighbours as projections for Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Central African Republic and Libya are not yet ready.

Egypt’s Al Ahram newspaper reports that efforts are being made to set up a meeting between army commander Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo in Saudi Arabia.

Al Jazeera spoke to Shihab Ibrahim, spokesman for the Forces of Freedom and Change, who said the discussions were still in the preliminary stages and relied on the truce holding.

“Saudi Arabia … is trying to present an initiative in coordination with the United States to use this 72-hour truce to convince the two sides that there be a ceasefire first and then negotiations,” Ibrahim said.

The Forces of Freedom and Change is an alliance that spearheaded protests that removed President Omar al-Bashir in 2019.

The International Committee of the Red Cross welcomes the announced ceasefire as a “potential lifesaver for civilians” trapped in their homes in areas where fighting has broken out.

“It’s clear that this ceasefire must be implemented up and down the chain of command and that it must hold for it to give a real respite to civilians suffering from the fighting,” said Patrick Youssef, ICRC’s regional director for Africa.

He called on the international community to help find a “durable political solution to end the bloodshed”.

An expert in Chad politics says the flow of refugees into Chad from Sudan comes at a time when humanitarian aid was already under stress in the eastern African nation.

“From previous Sudanese conflicts, eastern Chad already hosts 400,000 Sudanese refugees,” Remadji Hoinathy, form the Institute of Security Studies told Al Jazeera from the Chadian capital N’Djamena.

“Chad is very willing to receive the [new] refugees. But the challenge is … it is happening in the context where the World Food Programme is saying there are difficulties in providing for refugees that already in the country,” he added.

“It is a situation that is already putting the international help system in Chad under stress.”