Sudan: UN Chief calls for ceasefire as death toll hits 185

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on Sudan’s warring parties to immediately cease hostilities Monday as his envoy to Khartoum said at least 185 people had been killed by the fighting.

The UN chief warned that any further escalation in the confrontation between the army and paramilitary forces, which are both led by competing generals, “could be devastating for the country and the region.”

At least 185 people have died as a result of the violence, which started on Saturday and continued into Monday, Volker Perthes, the UN’s special representative to Sudan, told reporters.

The conflict erupted following weeks of power battles between the two generals who took control in a coup in 2021: Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of the Sudanese army, and Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who is in charge of the potent paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

“I am in constant contact with leaders of both sides,” Perthes told reporters at the UN headquarters in New York, via video-link from the Sudanese capital.

The UN has suspended much of its operations in the country, said Guterres’s spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, who stressed the UN was “not going to ask staff to go to work when clearly their safety is not being guaranteed.”

“This renewed fighting only aggravates what was already a fragile situation, forcing UN agencies and our humanitarian partners to temporarily shutter many of our more than 250 programmes across Sudan,” the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, Martin Griffiths, said in a statement.

“The impacts of this suspension will be felt immediately, especially in the areas of food security and nutritional support, in a country where some 4 million children and pregnant and lactating women are severely malnourished,” he added.

The UN Security Council held a closed-door meeting on the situation in Sudan on Monday morning.