The commander of the Rapid Support Forces fighting Sudan's army declared on Thursday that the capital Khartoum was the paramilitary's next target.
Addressing dozens of cheering fighters, Gen Mohamed Dagalo also sought to lure new volunteers to the ranks of the RSF, saying those who join will collect wages retroactive from April 2023, when the war broke out.
His comments follow major battlefield setbacks suffered by the paramilitary earlier this week, when the army and its allies seized Bara, a key city in the Kordofan region, as well as several areas alongside a major road to the capital Khartoum.
The defeats led Gen Dagalo to plead with his fighters to “march forward” and stand their ground, saying the present situation represented a “to be or not to be” moment for the paramilitary.
“Think of Khartoum! We promise all our people from this spot that our target is Khartoum,” said Gen Dagalo, whose forces swiftly captured the Sudanese capital in the early days of the war.
The army and its allies threw the RSF out of the capital in 2024 after months of street fighting across the sprawling, Nile-side metropolis.
Seeking to lift morale and attract new recruits, he said: “Anyone who works sincerely and truthfully or train and qualify [to join] the Rapid Support Forces will collect wages retroactively starting April 15.” He was alluding to the day the war broke out in April 2023.
He also told the fighters that promotions will be linked to their battlefield performance and urged them to reorganise their lines and take better care of their equipment, including fighting vehicles.
Earlier this week, Gen Dagalo praised the courage of his fighters after the loss of Bara, saying: “You have done everything you could.” But he also rebuked them for posting videos and images online of their location.
These are tantamount to “intelligence gifts” to the enemy, he said, without citing a specific incident.
“All of us must change our ways. Firstly, we must stop the photography. Only the designated person can do that,” he said. “You must abide by the law and the basics.”
The fall of Bara to the army on Sunday has added significance because it is only 50km from the large city of Al Obeid, parts of which have for months been besieged by the RSF.
Capturing Bara also gives the army access to the 350-kilometre motorway linking Kordofan to the capital, thus ensuring the security of supplies to the army garrison in Al Obeid and denying the RSF a route back to the capital, from which it was pushed out in 2024.
The RSF is allied with a powerful rebel group in Kordofan that has fought successive Khartoum governments for decades. The Sudanese Armed Forces is allied with rebel groups and Islamist militias once loyal to the regime of Omar Al Bashir, who was removed in 2019 after 29 years in power.
While the RSF controls the western region of Darfur, an area about the size of France, and parts of Kordofan and the southern Blue Nile state, the army controls the capital as well as the northern, central and eastern parts of the country.
Kordofan, a central region neighbouring Darfur, has been the main theatre of operations since the army lost the entire Darfur region when the city of El Fasher fell into the hands of the RSF last October.
The war between the armed forces and the RSF broke out when differences between Gen Abdel Fattah Al Burhan, the army chief and de facto ruler of Sudan, and Gen Dagalo 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 of 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.
Al Shafie Ahmed contributed to this report from Kampala, Uganda
