The World Health Organization (WHO) has spoken of an “extremely, extremely dangerous” situation after armed militants from one of the two warring factions in the Sudanese capital Khartoum occupied a laboratory that stores polio, measles, and cholera pathogens, warning there is a “high risk of biological hazard.”
The warning comes as fighting between supporters of two rival generals, the country’s military ruler and head of the army Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the head of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group, continues on despite a U.S.-brokered, 72-hour negotiated ceasefire having been agreed to a day before.
During comments given to the press via video call on Tuesday, April 25th, Nima Saeed Abid, the WHO’s representative in Sudan, said that the technicians from the National Public Health Laboratory, which is now completely under the control of one of the fighting parties, had been “kicked out” by armed militants.
Although Abid refrained from saying which group of fighters had seized the lab, media reports citing high-ranking health care workers say that the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) recently took control of the area surrounding the lab.
Abid told reporters that staff members no longer have any access to the laboratory and that the power supply is repeatedly interrupted. Therefore, “it is not possible to properly manage the biological materials that are stored in the laboratory for medical purposes,” he said.
“There is a huge biological risk associated with the occupation of the central public health lab,” said Abid, noting that samples of deadly diseases, including but not necessarily limited to measles, polio, and cholera, were contained within the lab.
For nearly two weeks now, the fighting between the army of de facto President Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces of his deputy Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, popularly known as Hemedti, has been ongoing.
Since the outbreak of the violence in mid-April, some 459 people have been killed, with another 4,072 injured, according to figures from the Sudanese health ministry. It is worth noting that a month earlier, in mid-February, Russia and Sudan’s ruling military government finalized terms of an agreement that would have allowed Russia to construct a naval base along Sudan’s Red Sea coast in exchange for providing weapons and military equipment to the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).
Some countries in the region, including U.S.-aligned Saudi Arabia and Egypt, allegedly attempted to dissuade Abdel Fattah al-Burhan from signing the deal.
Now, that agreement, which was set to last for 25 years, with automatic 10-year extensions so long as each side approves, may become null and void depending on the outcome of this internal conflict. In the case that the agreement does become null and void, it would represent a massive geostrategic win for the United States and its allies in the region, as Russia’s ambitions to expand its military presence in the region will have effectively been nixed, making it unable to shift the balance of power in one of the world’s most strategic waterways.
