(Al Jazeera Media Network) Sudan’s army has launched a major offensive in the capital, Khartoum, to regain ground held by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), military sources have told Al Jazeera.
The army carried out air raids on Thursday against RSF positions in the capital and north of Khartoum in its biggest assault in months.
The army attacked several military sites belonging to the RSF, the sources said, and the Sudanese Air Force was carrying out several flights over Khartoum.
At least four people were killed and 14 wounded during artillery shelling on Thursday morning by the RSF, which targeted residential neighbourhoods in the Karari Governorate, north of Omdurman, according to Khartoum State Health Ministry spokesman Mohamed Ibrahim.
Though the army retook some ground in Omdurman early this year, it depends mostly on artillery and air raids and has been unable to dislodge more effective RSF ground forces embedded in Khartoum.
Sudan plunged into conflict in April 2023, when long-simmering tensions between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo broke out in a conflict that has so far displaced more than 10 million people – about 8.1 million people inside Sudan while about two million have been forced to flee the country, according to data from the United Nations.
The RSF last weekend launched a large-scale offensive in el-Fasher after months of siege. El-Fasher is the only one of five state capitals in the vast Darfur region not yet in RSF hands.
The bloody civil war has caused a dire humanitarian crisis, but diplomatic efforts by the United States and other countries have faltered, with the army refusing to attend talks last month in Switzerland.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), more than 18,800 people have been killed and at least 33,000 injured since the conflict broke out in April 2023.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/26/sudans-army-launches-major-offensive-to-retake-khartoum
