Sudanese army seizes key buildings in Khartoum after retaking Republican Palace
The army’s gain came as a pro-democracy activist group said RSF fighters had killed at least 45 people in a city in the western region of Darfur.
Sudan’s military has consolidated its grip on the capital, retaking more key government buildings a day after it gained control of the Republican Palace from a paramilitary group.
Brigadier General Nabil Abdullah, a spokesman for the military, said troops had expelled the Rapid Support Forces from the headquarters of the National Intelligence Service and the Corinthia Hotel in central Khartoum.
The army also retook the headquarters of the Central Bank of Sudan and other government and educational buildings in the area, Brig Gen Abdullah said.
Hundreds of RSF fighters were killed while trying to flee the capital, he added.
The army’s gain came as a pro-democracy activist group said RSF fighters had killed at least 45 people in a city in the western region of Darfur.
On Friday, the military retook the Republican Palace, the pre-war seat of the government, in a major symbolic victory in the army’s nearly two years of war against the RSF.
A drone attack on the palace on Friday believed to have been launched by the RSF killed two journalists and a driver with Sudanese state television, according to the ministry of information.
Lieutenant Colonel Hassan Ibrahim, from the military’s media office, was also killed in the attack, officials said.
Volker Perthes, former UN envoy for Sudan, said the latest military advances will force the RSF to withdraw to its stronghold in the western region of Darfur.
“The army has gained an important and significant victory in Khartoum militarily and politically,” he told the Associated Press, adding that the military will soon clear the capital and its surrounding areas of the RSF.
But the advances do not mean the end of the war as the RSF holds territory in western Darfur and elsewhere. Mr Perthes said the war is likely to turn into an insurgency between the Darfur-based RSF and the military-led government in the capital.
“The RSF will be largely restricted to Darfur. We will return to the early 2000s,” he said, in reference to the conflict between rebel groups and the Khartoum government, then led by former president Omar al-Bashir.
At the start of the war in April 2023, the RSF took over multiple government and military buildings in the capital including the Republican Palace, the headquarters of the state television and the besieged military’s headquarters, known as the General Command.
It also occupied people’s houses and turned them into bases for their attacks against troops.
In recent months, the military took the lead in the fighting. It reclaimed much of Khartoum and its sister cities of Omdurman and Khartoum North, along with other cities elsewhere in the country.
In late January, troops lifted the RSF siege on the General Command, paving the way to retake the palace less than two months later.
The military is likely to try to retake Khartoum International Airport, 1.5 miles south east of the palace, which has been held by the RSF since the start of the war.
Videos posted on social media on Saturday purportedly showed soldiers on a road leading to the airport.
The RSF was accused on Saturday of being responsible for the deaths of at least 45 people in the city of al-Maliha.
The pro-democracy Resistance Committees, a network of youth groups tracking the war, said the RSF entered the city on Thursday and carried out attacks. The dead included at least a dozen women, according to a partial casualty list published by the group.
Al-Maliha, a strategic desert city in north Darfur near the borders with Chad and Libya, is around 125 miles north of the city of el-Fasher, which remains held by the Sudanese military despite near-daily strikes by RSF forces.
The war, which has wrecked the capital and other cities, has killed more than 28,000 people, forced millions more to flee their homes and left some families facing famine in parts of the country. Other estimates suggest a far higher death toll.
The fighting has been marked by atrocities including mass rape and ethnically motivated killings that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, especially in the western region of Darfur, according to the United Nations and international rights groups.
