Sudan's army shells Omdurman in push to oust RSF from capital region

By Khalid Abdelaziz

DUBAI (Reuters) - The Sudanese army shelled parts of Khartoum's twin city of Omdurman from early morning on Thursday, residents said, after declaring victory over their Rapid Support Forces rivals in a two-year battle for the capital.

The army ousted the RSF from its last footholds in Khartoum on Wednesday but the paramilitary RSF holds some areas in Omdurman, directly across the Nile River, and has consolidated in west Sudan, splitting the nation into rival zones.

Khartoum residents expressed delight fighting was over for the first time since it erupted in April 2023.

"During the last two years the RSF made our life hell killing and stealing. They didn't respect anybody including women and old men," teacher Ahmed Hassan, 49, said by phone.

The war has ruined much of Khartoum, uprooted more than 12 million Sudanese from their homes, and left about half of the 50 million population suffering acute hunger in what the U.N. calls the world's worst humanitarian disaster.

Overall deaths are hard to estimate but a study published last year said the toll may have reached 61,000 in Khartoum state alone in the first 14 months of the conflict.

The conflict has added to instability around northeast Africa, with Sudan's neighbours Libya, Chad, Central African Republic and South Sudan each weathering internal bouts of conflict over recent years.

In a video posted on Thursday from the recaptured presidential palace, army chief Abdul Fattah al-Burhan declared: "Khartoum is free".

The RSF said in a statement that it had never lost a battle, but that its forces had "strategically repositioned and expanded across the battlefronts to secure their military objectives", without naming Khartoum or other locations.

While the seizure of Khartoum marks a significant turning point, the war looks far from over.

Residents in the western state of Darfur said the RSF was shelling army positions in al-Fashir, the main city there, on Thursday.

RETREATING RSF

RSF fighters pulling out of Khartoum on Wednesday via a Nile dam 40 km south redeployed, some heading into Omdurman to help stave off army attacks and others heading west towards Darfur, witnesses said.

The army controls most of Omdurman, home to two big military bases, and looks focused on driving out the last RSF troops to secure control over Khartoum's entire urban area. Thursday's shelling was directed at southern Omdurman.

The RSF still holds a last patch of territory around the dam at Jebel Aulia south of Khartoum, two residents of the area said, to secure a line of retreat for stragglers.

Residents of a village in North Kordofan state said they had seen an RSF military convoy with dozens of vehicles passing through on its way west.

The army and RSF had been in a fragile partnership, jointly staging a coup in 2021 that derailed the transition from the Islamist rule of Omar al-Bashir, a longtime autocrat ousted in 2019.

The RSF, under Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, developed from Darfur's janjaweed militias and Bashir developed the group as a counterweight to the army, led by career officer Burhan.

Under an internationally backed transition plan the RSF was meant to integrate into the army, but there were disputes over how and when that should happen and fighting broke out.

In Khartoum the RSF quickly spread through residential districts, taking most of the city and besieging the better-equipped army in big military bases that had to be resupplied by air.

The army's capture of Khartoum could open the way for it to announce the formation of a government. The RSF has said it would support the formation of a rival civilian administration.

(Reporting by Khalid Abdelaziz in Dubai, Additional reporting by Jana Choukeir in Dubai, Writing by Angus McDowall,; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)