WAD MADANI, July 12 (AFP) - The United Nations on Wednesday (Jul 12) said nearly three months of war in Sudan have uprooted more than three million people, and called for the warring sides to face "accountability".

Britain said it was taking action. It announced sanctions on businesses it said were associated with Sudanese military groups on both sides of the conflict.

Fighting has raged in the northeast African country since mid-April, when army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who commands the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), turned on each other.

Safa Msehli, a spokeswoman for the UN's International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Geneva, told AFP that more than three million people had fled their homes because of the conflict.

IOM figures showed that more than 2.4 million people were now displaced within Sudan, while nearly 724,000 have escaped across the country's borders, in a continuously increasing stream.

"This is more than a figure, however: these are people who have been uprooted, fleeing for their lives," Msehli said, appealing for an immediate cessation of hostilities.

"We need the international community's sustained support to provide aid and protection to those affected by the conflict," she said.

Khartoum's millions of residents, cornered in the capital often without water or electricity in the searing heat of summer, were again subjected to air raids on Wednesday, witnesses said.

"Planes have been pounding RSF bases since dawn," one resident told AFP.

Dozens of civilians have been killed in air raids, and paramilitaries have established bases in residential areas.

Witnesses also reported artillery fire in Khartoum on Wednesday.

The conflict "risks morphing into an ethnicised, tribalised and ideologised conflict which is much closer to being a full-blown civil war," the United Nations Sudan chief Volker Perthes told reporters in Brussels.