The Sudanese Army takes Khartoum

The Sudanese Army, led by Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, announced the capture of the capital Khartoum in the civil war between the Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. 

The Sudanese Armed Forces announced that they had ‘complete control’ of the capital Khartoum, after having surrounded the presidential palace, which was controlled by the Rapid Support Forces, along with other important points in the capital such as Khartoum Airport, the Central Bank of Sudan, the Zain Telecommunications Tower, the Al-Fateh Tower, the offices of the prime minister, the headquarters of the Security and Intelligence Service, the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the facilities of the Air Defence Department. 

According to an official army communiqué, the clashes made it possible to consolidate the military presence at strategic points in the capital after an offensive that left behind corpses and military equipment abandoned by the enemy faction, considered terrorist by the ruling military forces. 

‘Our forces have managed to forcibly and skilfully cleanse the last redoubt of the terrorist militia in Khartoum,’ the army said in a statement posted on its official Facebook account. 

The head of the Sudanese army and president of the Sovereign Council of Transition, Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, had arrived at Khartoum International Airport on Wednesday for the first time since the start of the war and travelled to the presidential palace, where he proclaimed that the capital ‘had been liberated’. 

For their part, the RSF announced a reorganisation to reposition themselves in the context of the Sudanese civil war that has been going on for the last two years with the intention of ‘not surrendering’ to the advance of the Sudanese Army. ‘There will be neither retreat nor surrender,’ the RSF officially announced. 

‘Our detachments have not lost any battle, but they have repositioned themselves and opened up the battle fronts to ensure the achievement of their military objectives, which will ultimately lead to a decisive victory in this battle for the benefit of the Sudanese people,’ according to the official communication from the Rapid Support Forces.

The army controls the northern and eastern regions, while the Rapid Support Forces control parts of the south and the whole of the vast region of Darfur, which borders Chad to the west, an area suffering a major tragedy as more than nine million people need humanitarian aid in the region due to the crisis caused by the Sudanese conflict.

The political, military and humanitarian crisis in Sudan is a real tragedy, as the United Nations (UN) itself has condemned. 

The Sudanese nation is mired in a tragic political and humanitarian crisis aggravated by the civil war that has been raging since April 2023 between the army commanded by General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces led by Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, which has already left more than 20,000 deaths and around 14 million refugees and displaced people. 

Sudan has been experiencing great instability since the fall of the iron-fisted regime of Omar Al-Bashir, who ruled the country with an iron fist for 30 years. The Armed Forces brought about his downfall in 2019 after allegations of political abuse, persecution and corruption, and a transition process was opened that did not come to fruition. 

The army itself staged a coup d'état in 2021 that overthrew the civilian government of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok and a military regime was installed with Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan at its head, who also intended to develop a democratic transition, which did not prosper, leading to the current open civil war between factions within the army itself, divided between the supporters of Al-Burhan, head of the Sovereign Transition Council, and those of Hamdan Dagalo.