KHARTOUM – Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) shot at a Turkish evacuation plane as it was landing at Wadi Seyidna airport outside Khartoum on Friday, damaging its fuel system, Sudan’s army said.

Hundreds have died and tens of thousands of people have fled in two weeks of conflict between the army and its rival. The two factions agreed late on Thursday to prolong a ceasefire by 72 hours to allow for humanitarian access.

But fighting flared up in parts of the capital Khartoum on Friday, according to eyewitnesses and live video broadcasts.

Turkey’s Defence Ministry confirmed that a Turkish evacuation plane had been fired at and said there were no injuries. The RSF denied firing at the plane and said the army was “spreading lies”.

“Our forces have remained strictly committed to the humanitarian truce that we agreed upon since midnight, and it is not true that we targeted any aircraft in the sky of Wadi Seyidna in Omdurman,” the RSF said in a statement.

The Sudanese army said the plane was being repaired.

The fighting between the army and the RSF erupted on April 15 and disabled an internationally backed transition to democracy.

Ceasefire violations have persisted, which the United States has described as worrying.

Heavy gunfire and detonations rattled residential neighbourhoods of the capital region, where fighting has been concentrated over the past week.

Thick smoke was also observed above two areas in the adjacent city of Bahri, a Reuters reporter said.

“The situation this morning is very scary. We hear the sounds of planes and explosions. We don’t know when this hell will end,” said Bahri resident Mahasin al-Awad, 65.

“We’re in a constant state of fear for ourselves and our children.”

Sudan’s army has been directing air strikes with fighter jets or drones on RSF forces spread out in neighbourhoods across the capital.

In a statement on Friday, the RSF accused the army of violating the US- and Saudi-brokered truce pact by carrying out air strikes on its bases in Omdurman, Khartoum’s sister city across the Nile, and Mount Awliya.

The army blamed the RSF for violations late on Thursday.

There has also been a surge in violence in the Darfur region, where conflict has simmered since a brutal civil war erupted two decades ago and threatens to compound instability across a volatile swathe of Africa between the Sahel and the Red Sea.

United Nations humanitarian office spokesman Ravina Shamdasani said at least 96 people had been killed in Darfur since Monday in inter-communal violence rekindled by the army-RSF conflict.

The Sudan Doctors Union said on Friday that at least 387 civilians had been killed and 1,928 injured in the fighting since April 15, which has also caused a humanitarian crisis.

Relief agencies have been largely unable to distribute food to the needy in Africa’s third-largest country, where a third of its 46 million people were already reliant on donations. The top UN aid official in Sudan, Mr Abdou Dieng, said on Thursday that “very little can be done” in terms of humanitarian assistance. REUTERS