Sudan’s army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has given conditional approval for holding negotiations with his rival Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, head of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
“We are ready to engage in negotiations,” the army chief said in an interview with the BBC.
“Whenever he commits to what was agreed in Jeddah, we will sit to resolve this problem,” Burhan said.
Sudan has been mired by clashes between the army and the RSF since April, in a conflict that killed 5,000 and displaced more than 5.2 million people, according to UN figures.
Several cease-fire agreements brokered by Saudi Arabian and US mediators have failed to end the violence so far.
The army chief denied that Sudan would become a failed state like Somalia or a divided country like Libya amid the ongoing fighting.
“Sudan will remain united. Sudan will remain a state intact, not a failed state. We don’t want what happened in the other countries,” al-Burhan noted.
Burhan also denied reports about indiscriminate airstrikes by his forces on residential areas.
“This is not correct,” Burhan said.
In his speech to the UN General Assembly on Thursday, Burhan claimed that the conflict “is like the spark of war, a war that will spill over to other countries in the region.”
