CAIRO, May 3. /TASS/. The Sudanese army has agreed to hold talks with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces to establish and maintain a ceasefire, but not to end the fighting, a special envoy of the Sudanese army commander said in Cairo on Thursday.
"We agreed to negotiate with the RSF about a truce, not about the cessation of hostilities," the envoys was quoted as saying by the Al-Jazeera television channel.
He said that representatives of the army "will not sit down at the same [negotiating] table with the RSF, but are ready to conduct a dialogue through intermediaries."
The situation in Sudan escalated amid disagreements between the army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who also heads the ruling Sovereignty Council, and the head of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (also known as Hemedti), who is al-Burhan’s deputy on the council. The main points of contention between the two military organizations are related to the timeline and methods of forming unified armed forces of Sudan, as well as who should become the commander-in-chief of the army: a career military officer, which is an option supported by al-Burhan, or an elected civilian president, as Dagalo insists. On April 15, armed clashes between the rival military factions erupted near a military base in Merowe and in the capital, Khartoum. According to the country’s Health Ministry, several hundred people have been killed in the country since the conflict broke out.