Fighters rampage in Darfur as Sudan extends fragile truce

Armed fighters rampaged through a city in Sudan’s war-ravaged region of Darfur on Thursday, battling each other and looting shops and homes, residents said. The violence came despite the extension of a fragile truce between Sudan’s two top generals, whose power struggle has killed hundreds.

The mayhem in the Darfur city of Genena pointed to how the rival generals’ fight for control in the capital, Khartoum, was spiraling into violence in other parts of Sudan.

The two sides accepted a 72-hour extension of the truce late Thursday. The cease-fire has not stopped the fighting but created enough of a lull for tens of thousands of Sudanese to flee to safer areas and for foreign nations to evacuate thousands of their citizens by land, air and sea.

The cease-fire has brought a significant easing of fighting in Khartoum and its neighboring city Omdurman for the first time since the military and a rival paramilitary force began clashing on April 15, turning residential neighborhoods into battlegrounds.

Both the military, led by Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, led by Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, said that they accepted the extension of the truce. But explosions and heavy gunfire could be heard in at least one Khartoum neighborhood late Thursday.