Sudan's army said on Sunday that it has seized back control of a vital town and four nearby villages in the Kordofan region, alleviating some of the pressure placed by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary on the city of Al Obeid.
In a statement, the armed forces said its men and allied militiamen have captured the town of Bara along with the villages of Al Barakah, Umm Sayalah, Jobret Al Sheikh and Umm Qarfah after “fierce battles” that resulted in heavy losses among RSF fighters.
“Some of them fled the battlefield under the pressure of continuing strikes, leaving behind weapons and hardware,” it added.
Videos shared online showed army troops and their allies showing off fighting vehicles captured from the RSF. One video purported to show them riding vehicles from which they fired at what appeared to be fleeing RSF fighters. The National could not immediately vouch for the authenticity of the videos.
Bara is less than 50km away from Al Obeid, the capital of Northern Kordofan, which has been partially besieged by the RSF for most of the three years since the war between the army and the paramilitary broke out in 2023.
Bara has changed hands several times since the war began, but its capture by the army now has added significance given that Kordofan has been the main theatre of operations since the army lost the entire Darfur region to the RSF with the fall of the city of El Fasher last year.
The capture of Bara and the villages also extends the army's control over the road linking northern Kordofan to Omdurman, one of the three Nile-side cities that comprise the capital's greater region. It also secures a supply route to the army garrison inside Al Obeid.
The latest battlefield gains in Kordofan follow similar inroads made by the army in the southern Blue Nile region. They also underline the resolve of Gen Abdel Fattah Al Burhan, the army chief and Sudan's de facto ruler, to continue fighting the RSF while resisting international pressure to enter negotiations to end the conflict.
The war between the armed forces and the RSF broke out when differences between Gen Al Burhan and Gen Mohamed Dagalo, the RSF commander, boiled over into open hostilities that began in the capital but soon spread across most of the vast Afro-Arab nation.
There are varying estimates for the number of people killed since the war began in April 2023, with accounts of the death toll ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. The war has also displaced about 14 million people and created the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
Apart from Darfur, the RSF controls parts of the Kordofan and Blue Nile regions, while the army controls the capital as well as northern, central and eastern Sudan. Each side has its own government, with the army-aligned one sitting in Port Sudan on the Red Sea and the RSF's in Nyala in Darfur.
Al Shafie Ahmed contributed to this report from Kampala, Uganda.
