Nairobi, May 5, (dpa/GNA) – More than 12,000 people have fled to the Ethiopian border town of Metemma, since the beginning of the fighting in Sudan about three weeks ago, the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) said on Thursday.
New arrivals amount to more than a thousand people, the organization said. Those fleeing the war include Sudanese citizens, returning Ethiopians and people from more than 50 other countries.
According to its own information, the IOM supports the refugees by transporting them from the border to Gondar, the nearest Ethiopian city, as well as to the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa. Many of those fleeing Sudan do not have any possessions and are accommodated in IOM’s transit centres.
In Sudan, de facto president Abdel Fattah al-Burhan is fighting a power struggle with the help of the armed forces against his deputy Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, who heads the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
The two generals had taken over Sudan through joint military coups, but were supposed to relinquish power.
The two camps had a falling out over power-sharing issues, resulting in open fighting on April 15, which plunged the country of around 46 million people into crisis.
GNA