Abdel Fattah al-Burhan says he will not attend talks with RSF in Switzerland after attack on military graduation.
Sudan's army chief, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, said the military will not join talks next month in Switzerland aimed at ending more than a year of fighting with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
Al-Burhan made the statement on Wednesday, shortly after the military said he survived a drone strike on a military graduation at the Gibeit military base in eastern Sudan that killed at least five people.
“We will not retreat, we will not surrender and we will not negotiate,” Al-Burhan told the troops.
“We are not afraid of drones,” he said at the Gibeit base, which is about 100 kilometres southwest of Port Sudan, where the army-aligned government fled after war broke out with the RSF in April last year. The fighting has created the world's biggest displacement crisis and killed at least 15,500 people, according to UN estimates.
The video of the drone strike, verified by Reuters news agency, shows soldiers marching at a graduation ceremony before a whirring sound is heard. Then an explosion is heard.
Footage shared by the military, which it said was filmed in Gibeit after the attack, shows Al-Burhan being surrounded by civilians who were cheering and chanting: “One army, one people.”
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, but RSF has denied that the paramilitary force, which controls large parts of the country, was responsible.
On Wednesday, RSF legal adviser Mohamed al-Mukhtar told Reuters the attack was the “result of internal disagreements among Islamists.” No further details were immediately available.
Rejection of talks
Al-Burhan’s rejection of the talks in Switzerland comes days after RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo said the group would take part in the negotiations, which were to be co-hosted by the United States and Saudi Arabia on August 14.
The UN, the African Union and Egypt were expected to be observers. The United Arab Emirates, which has denied accusations that it is supplying arms to the RSF, would also attend.
Sudan's foreign ministry said on Tuesday it conditionally accepted the invitation to the talks, but only if they were preceded by a “complete withdrawal and end to expansion” of the RSF.
Al-Burhan and Hemedti briefly shared power after the 2021 overthrow of a transitional council established following the ouster of President Omar al-Bashir in a popular uprising two years earlier.
But the power struggle between the two, fuelled by plans to merge their two forces, led to war in April 2023, when fighting first broke out in the capital Khartoum. Since then, the RSF has taken control of most of the Darfur region and Gezira state.
The paramilitary force has also recently launched an offensive in Sennar state in southeastern Sudan and has been laying siege to El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, cutting off residents' access to food and supplies.
Both sides have accused each other of war crimes, including deliberate attacks on civilians, indiscriminate shelling of residential areas and blocking humanitarian aid. In a report released Tuesday, Human Rights Watch said both sides have committed widespread sexual and gender-based violence in Khartoum.
Meanwhile, the International Organization for Migration said in June that nearly 10 million people in Sudan have been displaced by the fighting, which has pushed half the population into hunger.
The two sides last held direct talks last year in Saudi Arabia, but they ended in temporary truces that were quickly violated.
Other mediation efforts have failed to bring the two sides directly to the negotiating table, although UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres' personal envoy Ramtane Lamamra held talks with delegations from both sides in Geneva this month.
A UN spokesman called the talks “an encouraging first step.”
