Sudan’s military has retaken the presidential palace in Khartoum, the last bastion in the capital of rival paramilitary forces, after nearly two years of fighting.
Social media videos showed soldiers inside giving the date as the 21st day of Ramadan, which was Friday. A Sudanese military officer wearing a captain’s epaulettes made the announcement in the video, and confirmed the troops were inside the compound.
The palace appeared to be partly in ruins, with soldiers crunching broken tiles beneath their boots. Troops carrying assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers chanted: “God is the greatest!”
Sudan’s information minister said in a post on X that the military had retaken the palace. “Today the flag is raised, the palace is back and the journey continues until victory is complete,” Khaled al-Aiser wrote.
The fall of the Republican Palace, a compound along the Nile River that was the seat of government before the war erupted and features on Sudanese banknotes and postage stamps, marks another battlefield gain for Sudan’s military. It has made steady advances in recent months underGen Abdel-Fattah al-Burhan.
It means the rival Rapid Support Forces, under Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, have been expelled from Khartoum after Sudan’s war began in April 2023.
The group did not immediately acknowledge the loss, which is unlikely to stop the fighting as the RSF and its allies still hold territory elsewhere in Sudan. Late on Thursday, the RSF claimed it seized control of the al-Maliha, a strategic desert city in North Darfur. Sudan’s military has acknowledged fighting around al-Maliha, but has not said it lost the city.
Al-Maliha is about 125 miles (200km) north of the city of El Fasher, which remains held by the Sudanese military despite near-daily strikes by the RSF.
The head of the UN children’s agency has said the conflict created the world’s largest and humanitarian crisis.
The war has killed more than 28,000 people, forced millions to flee their homes and left some families eating grass in a desperate attempt to survive as famine sweeps parts of the country. Other estimates suggest a far higher death toll.
The Republican Palace had been the seat of power during the British colonisation of Sudan, and was the site of some of the first independent Sudanese flags to be raised over the country in 1956. It had also been the main office of Sudan’s president and other top officials.
The Sudanese military have long targeted the palace and its grounds, shelling and firing on the compound.
Sudan, in north-eastern Africa, has been unstable since a popular uprising forced the removal of the longtime autocratic president Omar al-Bashir in 2019. A short-lived transition to democracy was derailed when Burhan and Dagalo led a military coup in 2021. The RSF and Sudan’s military then began fighting each other in 2023.
Burhan’s forces, including Sudan’s military and allied militias, have advanced against the RSF since the start of this year. They retook a key refinery north of Khartoum. They have also pushed in on RSF positions around the capital. The fighting has led to an increase in civilian casualties.
Bashir faces charges at the international criminal court of carrying out a genocidal campaign in the early 2000s in the western Darfur region with the Janjaweed, the precursor to the RSF. Rights groups and the UN accuse the RSF and allied Arab militias of again attacking ethnic African groups in this war.
Since the war began, the Sudanese military and the RSF have faced allegations of human rights abuses. Before Joe Biden left office, the US state department declared the RSF was committing genocide.
The military and the RSF have denied committing abuses.
