SUDANESE resistance committees scrambled today to help civilians flee the chaos engulfing the country as the bitter power struggle between two rival generals continued.

Fighting between the forces led by the army chief General Abdel-Fattah Burhan and those of Rapid Support Forces (RSF) leader General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo have led many civilians to risk the long and dangerous drive to the northern border into Egypt.

“We travelled 15 hours on land at our own risk,” Suliman al-Kouni, an Egyptian student, said at the Arqin border crossing with Egypt. 

“But many of our friends are still trapped in Sudan,” he said.

Prominent Sudanese film-maker Amjad Abual-Ala wrote on Facebook that his mother, siblings and nephews “are on the road from Sudan to Cairo through Aswan,” referring to Egypt’s southernmost city.

Fighting continued to rage in Khartoum and other cities despite the promise of a ceasefire to coincide with the three-day Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr.

More than 420 people, including 264 civilians, have been killed and over 3,700 wounded in nine days of fighting between the Sudanese armed forces and the powerful paramilitary RSF.

The ferocity of the violence has prompted humanitarian groups to pause their aid operations throughout the country, but the slack has been taken up by the country’s resistance committees.

The committees are informal neighbourhood networks that began by playing a key role in the Sudanese revolution by organising civil disobedience campaigns against the authoritarian rule of Omar al-Bashir in 2013.

The committees have helped to co-ordinate medical care and the evacuation of civilians caught up in the fighting.

They have also spread anti-war messages throughout local communities.

Many activists have been using the social media hashtag #NotoWar to circulate information on the safest roads and side streets to escape the heavy clashes between the warring factions.

Kholood Khair, founding director of Confluence Advisory, a Khartoum think tank, said: “The resistance committees maintain their legitimacy because they do something differently than political elites in this country and that is service provision. 

“They have always centred all their political work around service and they are doing that much more now during the war.” 

Those people desperate to escape the fighting are having to rely on resistance committees to buy fuel for cars and motorbikes, said Zuhair al-Dalee, a member of a resistance committee in the district of East Nile Khartoum.

But, he said, “there is no gas [to rescue people].“