Sudan’s military recaptured a key town in Sudan’s regional capital on Saturday, expelling a military group that the United States accused last week of killing people.
Sudan’s information minister said the army had “liberated” the town, Wad Madani, and the army said the army was working to “remove the remnants of the rebels” from the area.
If the army can hold on to the city, it would be its most significant victory since the war began nearly two years ago. Experts say the focus of the war is likely to shift north to Khartoum, the capital.
Videos circulating online show soldiers entering Wad Madani, about 100 miles south of the capital. Local media reported that soldiers from the militia group, known as the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, were fleeing the city.
The leader of this group, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, admitted that he was defeated but promised that he will soon retake the city. “Today we lost in the round; we did not lose the war,” he said in an audio speech addressing his soldiers and the people of Sudan.
The victory brought jubilant scenes in the military-held parts of the country among Sudanese who hoped it could mark a turning point in a devastating civil war that has led to massacres, genocide and widespread famine in one of Africa’s largest countries.
People gather in the war-scarred streets of Khartoum, while church bells toll in Port Sudan, the wartime capital where many Sudanese have fled the fighting. Celebrations also broke out among Sudanese exiles in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
The RSF’s defeat came a year after the group captured Wad Madani in a victory that forced tens of thousands of people to flee and sent waves of terror across Sudan. The group’s soldiers have continued to capture large swaths of the country, far from their stronghold in Darfur in western Sudan.
But some of the most brutal fighting was in Darfur, where RSF fighters killed members of rival tribes, according to human rights groups and the United Nations. Last week the United States officially ruled that the killings amounted to genocide, and imposed sanctions on the leader of the RSF, General Hamdan, better known as Hemeti.
The United States has also imposed sanctions on seven United Arab Emirates companies it suspects of trading gold and buying weapons on behalf of the RSF.
In recent months, the tide of the war has appeared to be turning as the RSF cedes ground to Khartoum and the eastern parts of the country. The army launched an attack in the area around Wad Madani, which ended with the city being recaptured on Saturday.
Still, it was too early to tell whether the victory would change the course of the conflict. Since the first shot was fired in April 2023, the momentum of the war has swung back and forth, sometimes violently.
The army and the RSF were once allies, and their leaders joined a military coup in 2021. But in the war between them, they have enjoyed the support of different foreign countries.
The RSF is supported by the United Arab Emirates, a wealthy Gulf donor that has provided it with weapons and powerful drones, most of which are smuggled into Sudan from neighboring countries.
The Sudanese military has received or bought weapons from Iran, Russia and Turkey. Both sides mined the country’s vast gold reserves to fund the war.
For ordinary Sudanese people, the war has brought only misery, death and destruction, killing tens of thousands of people, displacing 11 million from their homes and starting one of the world’s worst famines in decades.
The organization responsible for hunger in the world known as IPC, last month reported that hunger has spread in five areas in Sudan and is expected to reach five more in the coming months. In total, 25 million Sudanese suffer from severe or chronic hunger.
Both sides have committed atrocities and war crimes, according to the United Nations and US officials, although only the RSF has been accused of ethnic cleansing.
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