A new battle is fought for Khartoum. A year and a half after being defeated in the center of the country’s capital, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by General Al-Bourhane, are trying to regain control of the heart of the city, which had fallen into the hands of the Rapid Support Forces (FSR) of General Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, known as “Hemetti”, during the first days of the war that has torn Sudan apart since April 15, 2023.
The operation began on Thursday, September 26 at dawn. Two brigades of the regular army attacked the two bridges that separate the city of Omdurman from Khartoum, managing to penetrate the district of El-Mugran, at the confluence of the White Nile and the Blue Nile. For a week, FAS troops have maintained advanced positions there. A lightning advance that was accompanied by a massive bombing campaign against paramilitary positions in the capital.
Most of the civilians who still live in the middle of a city turned into a field of ruins remain cloistered in their homes. “We heard constant air strikes. The fighting rages, with artillery and heavy weapons. Yesterday five shells fell in my neighborhood »he says calmly to Omar*, a resident of a disputed area who wishes to remain anonymous.
Paramilitaries caught in the middle
With this unprecedented offensive since the reconquest in February of Omdurman, the most populated city in the country, the FAS is trying to free its units entrenched for many months in the army headquarters and the university of Khartoum, not far north of the airport. However, its successes were limited, and the RSF managed to maintain its control over key sites in the city center, around the presidential palace.
If the regular army advances slowly in Khartoum, it does so much faster in the northern suburbs of the capital, where on Thursday it took the Halfaya Bridge, which connects Omdurman with the city of Bahri, thus managing to establish connection with its infantry. divisions stationed in Kadaroo area. An important victory that now allows the FAS to head south and take the paramilitary troops with a grain of salt.
From this town of Bahri, on the banks of the Nile, the RSF fired most of the shells and missiles that fell on army positions and residential areas of Omdurman. Between September 19 and 25 alone, paramilitary bombings killed 50 civilians, according to a medical source. “Now that the army has advanced to the other bank of the Nile, we are safer and the indiscriminate bombing has reduced. But we still constantly hear the sound of fighting in the distance.”testifies Omdurman Alaa Abdelqader, who worked in a medical analysis laboratory in Khartoum before the war.
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