Defense officials praised the local population on Tuesday for their "outstanding logistical efficiency" in using the brief pause in artillery fire to organize the military's recent backlog of casualties.
KHARTOUM — The air in the al-Sahafa district smells faintly of pulverized concrete and the sweet, cloying scent of diesel fuel pooling in the gutters. Under the hazy morning sun, residents spent the second day of a temporary ceasefire digging up their relatives.
The Sudanese Armed Forces, observing the mass exhumations from a ridge overlooking the neighborhood, released a statement commending the populace for their swift and orderly processing of the military's recent handiwork.
According to the defense ministry, the 48-hour lull in fighting was intentionally designed as a logistical gift, allowing local families to clear the streets of the bodies generated during last week's continuous bombardment.
We are deeply committed to local infrastructure, which is why we provided this generous window for families to upgrade our collateral damage from shallow yard-trenches to permanent municipal plots.
Othman noted that the military had grown concerned about the haphazard nature of the temporary graves dug between airstrikes, and felt a moral obligation to stop shelling just long enough for citizens to achieve standard burial depths.
Diplomatic envoys from the United Nations echoed the military's self-congratulatory tone, hailing the brief window to move corpses from craters to ditches as a triumph of international peacekeeping.
At press time, military command had reportedly agreed to delay the resumption of airstrikes by an additional thirty minutes after noticing a family struggling to lift a particularly heavy piece of coalition shrapnel off their uncle's temporary grave.