Sudanese army, paramilitary RSF to return to Jeddah negotiations
PHOTO CAPTION: A Sudanese national flag is attached to a machine gun of Paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) soldiers as they wait for the arrival of Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, deputy head of the military council and head of RSF, before a meeting in Aprag village 60, kilometers away from Khartoum, Sudan, June 22, 2019. REUTERS/Umit Bektas
By Nafisa Eltahir, Khalid Abdelaziz and Daphne Psaledakis
CAIRO/DUBAI (Reuters) -Sudan's army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces will return to the negotiating table in Jeddah on Thursday, senior U.S. State Department officials said, as a six-month war has taken its toll on the country and on both forces.
The Sudanese army said on Wednesday it accepted the invitation as "negotiations are one of the means that may end the conflict," but that it would not stop fighting. The RSF did not immediately have a statement, but on Wednesday published video of its second-in-command leading soldiers in Nyala, a major war zone.
Fighting broke out in mid-April over plans to integrate troops, four years after the two forces ousted President Omar al-Bashir, and 18 months after they led a coup to oust civilian partners.
Since then, fighting has decimated the capital and other major cities, displacing almost 6 million people and killing thousands, and the RSF has been accused of an ethnic massacre in West Darfur.
The United States and Saudi Arabia suspended talks in June after numerous ceasefire violations
"Both sides privately indicated that they are ready to resume talks," said one of the U.S. officials, adding that months of fighting and a humanitarian crisis had weighed on both sides.
Eyewitnesses say that the pace of fighting has slowed in the past week, with both sides resorting to long-range artillery that have rained projectiles on residential neighborhoods.
Military sources say the army has struggled to make repairs to aging warplanes while the RSF has struggled to treat wounded soldiers. Both have had difficulty paying their exhausted forces, the sources said.
The African Union and regional body IGAD would be joining the Jeddah talks, which would initially focus on humanitarian issues, ceasefires, and confidence-building measures in order to lay the groundwork for a negotiated solution to the conflict.
Civilian leaders, who have been holding organising meetings in Addis Ababa this week, would not be participating in the initial rounds but could be brought in later, as one of the officials said that both sides' failure to protect civilians made clear they were no longer fit to rule the country going forward.
The army's second in command, General Shams el-Din Kabbashi, emerged from the capital earlier this week for the first time since fighting started. In a video, he said the army was ready for negotiations, but "we will not let bygones be bygones."
Despite the army's willingness to talk, diplomats and Sudanese sources say Bashir loyalists, who have heavy influence in the military, reject negotiations and would prefer to continue to rebuild influence as fighting continues.
(Reporting by Khalid Abdelaziz and Nayera Abdallah in Dubai, Nafisa Eltahir in Cairo, Daphne Psaledakis and Simon Lewis in Washington; editing by Mark Heinrich and Jonathan Oatis)
