KHARTOUM: The Sudanese army on Wednesday recaptured Khartoum airport from the Rapid Support Forces, an army source told AFP, while troops surrounded the paramilitaries’ last major holdout position south of the city. The army, battling the RSF since April 2023, “fully secured” the airport in central Khartoum from RSF fighters stationed inside, the source said, requesting anonymity because he is not authorized to brief the media.

Following their recapture of the presidential palace in a key victory on Friday, army troops have surged through central Khartoum, seizing state institutions captured early in the war by the RSF, before heading south. “In the south of the capital, our forces have surrounded the strategic Jebel Awliya area from three directions: north, south and east,” the source said, adding that “all axes are advancing steadily”.

The Jebel Awliya bridge, which crosses the White Nile south of the city center, is the only crossing out of the area still under RSF control, linking the paramilitary group to its strongholds in the western Darfur region. Across the city, eyewitnesses and activists reported this week that RSF fighters were retreating southwards from neighborhoods they previously controlled, ostensibly towards Jebel Awliya.

Since April 2023, the war has killed tens of thousands of people, uprooted more than 12 million and created the world’s largest hunger and displacement crises.

The war has left much of Khartoum a shell of its former self. According to the United Nations, over 3.5 million people were forced to flee the capital, leaving entire neighborhoods largely abandoned. Millions more, unable or unwilling to leave, were left to face hunger, rights abuses and indiscriminate shelling of their homes by both sides.

Two medical sources told AFP that the RSF had evacuated Tamayoz Hospital, just south of the airport, which they had used since the start of the war to treat their fighters. “The area has been completely empty of the RSF since last night,” Osama Abdel Qader, a resident of the nearby Sahafa neighborhood, told AFP on Wednesday.

In the capital’s South Belt area, where activists have reported some of the war’s worst rights abuses, Issa Hussein said “the RSF has been less active in the streets since Sunday”. “Yesterday, I saw seven (RSF) vehicles carrying furniture and families heading towards Jebel Awliya,” he told AFP. Since the war began, the RSF has been accused looting and taking over people’s homes, with rights groups documenting systematic sexual violence and other abuses. Following months of defeat, the army appeared to turn the tide late last year, sweeping through central Sudan before recovering nearly the entire capital. – AFP