The Sudanese military forces took over the presidential palace in the capital marked by the battle, Khartoum, early Friday, signaling a potential turning point in the devastating civil war of Sudan, now approaching his third year.
The videos and photos published Friday morning showed standing soldiers in a triumphant way at the entrance to the devastated palace, which overlooks the Nile river, after days of heavy fighting with the rapid support forces, or RSF, the powerful paramilitary group to which the army fought.
“We are inside!” Cried an unidentified officer in a video, while the applauding soldiers grouped around him. “We are in the Republican Palace!”
The Minister of Information of Sudan confirmed that the palace was back in government control. “Today, the flag is increased, the palace is back and the journey continues until the end of the victory”, the minister, Khalid Ali al-Rise, wrote on social networks.
It was a major symbolic victory for the Army of Sudan, which lost most of Khartoum against the RSF in the early days of the war in April 2023. It was also a significant boost for the military’s six -month journey to repel the city’s paramilitaries.
A few days earlier, the head of the RSF, Lieutenant-General Mohamed Hamdan, had promised to stand up. “Do not think that we will withdraw from the palace,” he said last week in a video address from an uncompromising location.
But the military and allied militias, which gradually seized most of the parts of the north and the east of the city, have greatly urged their target. Early Thursday, the army launched a puffed ambush on an RSF convoy south of the palace, apparently when RSF troops were trying to flee, showed video sequences.
Shops and explosions were heard in the capital for a large part of Thursday.
“God is the greatest. We have captured the Republican Palace,” wrote Misbah Abu Zeid, head of Bara Ibn Malik Battalion, an Islamist militia who fought alongside the military while the battle was heading towards the center of Khartoum, on social media.
The launch of a major counter-offensive last September. Since then, he has captured strategic bridges on the Nile and, in recent months, has seized the north and east of the city.
The war broke out in April 2023 after months of tension between the military chief, General Abdul Fattah al-Burhan and General Hamdan of the RSF, the two men had seized power in a military coup in 2021, but could not agree on how to integrate their forces.
As the RSF has withdrawn from the east and northern Khartoum since January, war toll has become clearly apparent.
Whole districts have become a charred wasteland, as journalists from the New York Times saw it during last week in the city.
Baler vehicles were dispersed in the deserted streets. The apartment buildings stood burnt down or looted, and the banks were opened. White smoke gave a giant wheat silo.
In the city center, the army elite shooters led to their rifles through the windows of a deserted luxury building overlooking the Nile. On the distant bank, a river boat collapsed on the side. A surveillance drone burst over the head.
A lace curtain turned the SGT. Major Ismail Hassan while he was looking through his twins at the bombed presidential palace, who was seated in the middle of a group of off -offed office blocks.
“They have many elite shooters deployed in large buildings,” said the army officer. “This is what makes things so difficult.”
The best RSF elite shooters came from Ethiopia, he said, citing military intelligence reports. A document found by the Times in a deserted RSF base in the city, listing recent Ethiopian recruits, supported this idea.
According to some estimates, the capital’s pre-war population of about eight million people has been reduced to two million. In recently recapped areas, the army has moved residents to temporary camps at the edge of the city, where the army deposits RSF sympathizers, said several residents.
For those who are still in the city, there was a feeling of palpable relief that the RSF had disappeared.
“In the days preceding their departure, they demanded money,” said Kamal Juma, 42, while he was kicking a hose broken in the street. “If you couldn’t pay, they shot you on a bullet.”
Mr. Juma cleaned the sweat of his forehead.
“We can no longer take this war,” he said.
Even if the army manages to drive the Khartoum RSF, there is little prospects for the war at the end, according to analysts.
This started as a quarrel of power between the two generals exploded in a much broader conflict powered by a confusing range of foreign powers.
The United Arab Emirates support the RSF with rifles, drones and mercenaries, Times reported. This support has continued in recent months, even since the United States accused the Genocide RSF in January, according to two Western officials and some American legislators.
The Emirates deny the support of the paramilitaries.
On the other hand, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have sold, provided or paid weapons to the soldiers of Sudan, said the two Western officials on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive issues.
In some parts of the city, wild bushes have germinated in empty streets, adding to the apocalyptic air. The faded display panels, erected before the war, announced goods to a tenth of their current prices – a reflection of the crushing economic cost of war.
But the image is clearly different in Omdurman, west of Nileand controlled by the army. Here, markets and restaurants are lively, and even jewelry stores have reopened as residents spread.
Even here, however, death is never far away.
Monday evening, a volley of RSF rockets landed in a quiet street where six neighbors gathered under a palm to drink coffee after the fast for Ramadan.
After an explosion rocked his house, Moamer Atiyatallah tripped in the dust cloud, calling his friends under the palm, “What happened, guys?”
No one answered. The six men – a carpenter, an automotive merchant and a ripe pousse driver, among others – had been killed, as well as two other men who passed through the streets.
An hour after the strike, moving women had spread in the dark street, where men with a stony face picked up leftover flesh and gathered them in plastic bags. A distraught young girl has exceeded.
“Father!” She shouted. “Father!”
Abdalrahman Altayeb Contributed reports.
