RSF resistance stalls Sudanese army advance in Khartoum

Troops and allied militiamen meet fierce opposition in Bahri after capturing most of the city’s central and southern areas

Smoke rising over Khartoum in May 2023 as clashes between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces entered their third week. AFP

Stiff resistance by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces is stalling the advance of Sudan's army and allied militiamen in the capital, witnesses said on Friday.

They reported fierce street battles taking place in Bahri, one of three cities that make up the capital's greater region along with Khartoum and Omdurman, following the army's swift advances in the area over the past week.

The army and the militia fighters were bogged down in several Bahri districts, witnesses said, including Kafuri, where the city's richest and most powerful families lived in villas on leafy streets.

In the south of Bahri, repeated attempts by the army and the militiamen to cross the Al Mk Nemer Bridge over the Blue Nile into Khartoum have been thwarted by RSF snipers. Crossing the bridge would put the army within a short distance of the RSF-held presidential palace, several ministries and the commercial hub of the capital.

Street battles also raged on Thursday and Friday as the army tried to advance on the presidential palace from the armed forces headquarters in Khartoum, the witnesses said.

Gen Mohamed Dagalo, commander of the Rapid Support Forces, surrounded by fighters as he delivers a speech. AFP

RSF commander Gen Mohamed Dagalo vowed to repel the army's offensive in the capital, urging his fighters not to dwell on the territory they had lost but to focus on what they could capture, in recorded comments posted online on Friday.

“You're as good as gold. You're lions,” he told his fighters in an apparent bid to lift morale after a string of battlefield defeats. In cryptic comments directed towards army chief Gen Abdel Fattah Al Burhan, he said: “You are not quite out yet of the trap we have set up for you.”

Gen Al Burhan said on Sunday that his troops would throw the RSF out of Bahri within days, then head to Omdurman and Khartoum, both of which remain mostly in the hands of the RSF.

Outside the capital, the RSF controls most of the vast Darfur region in the west, large swathes of Kordofan in the south-west and areas south of the capital. The army remains in full control of northern and eastern Sudan as well as regions to the south-east of the capital.

The army's recent battlefield gains in the capital are significant, including last week's recapture of the armed forces headquarters in Khartoum; breaking the siege of the Signals Corps base in Bahri; and retaking a major oil refinery north of the city where the paramilitary had kept a large contingent of fighters.

A fire engulfing Sudan's largest oil refinery in Bahri on January 24 in a satellite image. AP

The war broke out in April 2023 when the rivalry between Gen Al Burhan and his one-time ally Gen Dagalo boiled over into street fighting in the capital that soon spread out across much of the vast Afro-Arab nation.

The pair are competing to dominate the resource-rich country, where the civil war has killed tens of thousands and forced more than 10 million people to flee their homes, three million of whom left Sudan.

The fighting has also created the world's most serious humanitarian crisis, with 26 million people, more than half the population, facing acute hunger and pockets of famine surfacing in various parts of Sudan.

Both Gen Al Burhan and Gen Dagalo stand accused of war crimes by the UN and international rights groups. They were sanctioned by the US government in the final days of former US president Joe Biden's administration earlier this month. However, the pair insist they are fighting to defend Sudan and its people.

Al Shafie Ahmed reported from Kampala, Uganda