Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, chief of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and nominal leader of the ruling junta, declared on Wednesday that the capital city of Khartoum has been recaptured from the insurgent Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by his former coup partner, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, after two years of fighting.
“Khartoum is now free. It’s over. Khartoum is free. Free. Free,” Burhan declared in a video that showed him touring the presidential palace in the company of his troops.
“This is a pivotal and decisive moment in the history of Sudan. Khartoum is free, as it should be,” said Burhan’s information minister and spokesman, Khalid Aleiser.
The SAF said only “small pockets here and there” of RSF fighters remained in Khartoum, and even those are “being cleared out.” The military buttressed its claims with video of RSF fighters fleeing the capital city.
Burhan and Dagalo led the coup that overthrew Sudan’s transitional government in 2021 – a government that was itself installed by a coup against longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019.
In 2023, Burhan and Dagalo had a falling-out that quickly escalated into a remarkably brutal civil war, leading to war crimes on both sides, a massive humanitarian crisis, and over 700,000 refugees.
Dagalo is the leader of the RSF, a paramilitary group formed in 2013 from the remains of the infamous Janjaweed militia. The Janjaweed was created when a desperate Bashir decided to arm Arabic-speaking nomads and use them as shock troops against incursions from Libya and Chad in the 1980s.
This counterinsurgency force proved to be highly effective, and incredibly savage, as they slaughtered entire villages, raped captive women, razed vital farmland, and conducted an ethnic cleansing campaign against non-Arabs. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell accused the Janjaweed of genocide in 2004.
This was not a promising history for the RSF, which has been accused of Janjaweed-style atrocities by human rights groups, the United Nations, and the United States.
The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in 2023 described the RSF as “an entity whose members have engaged in acts of violence and human rights abuses, including the massacre of civilians, ethnic killings, and use of sexual violence.” In January 2025, then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused the RSF of genocide, much as the Janjaweed stood accused two decades earlier.
Burhan’s SAF has also been accused of wantonly killing hundreds of civilians, largely through indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas where RSF fighters were believed to be entrenched. The capital of Khartoum became one of the bloodiest conflict zones when RSF forces occupied the city early in the civil war, forcing Burhan to relocate the seat of his government to Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast.
The SAF has always enjoyed a significant advantage in resources and equipment, especially air power, but the RSF was able to quickly dig into urban areas and capture or disable strategic facilities like airports. The RSF still holds a great deal of territory in western Sudan, but the SAF was able to slowly encircle Khartoum, cutting off the occupying militia fighters from supplies and reinforcements.
On Friday, the SAF announced it had recaptured the presidential palace, scoring a major symbolic victory. By Wednesday, the last RSF base south of the city had been eliminated, and the army was preparing to move on Khartoum’s airport.
Deputy SAF commander Yasser al-Atta celebrated the army’s gains in Khartoum on Tuesday by stating the “decisive battle to eliminate the rebellion” has entered its “final phase.” Most observers feel this judgement is a bit premature, as the tide of war has only recently shifted in Burhan’s favor, and the RSF still controls territory in the Darfur region that is almost as large as the entire nation of France.
Cairo-based analyst Amgad Fareid Eltayeb told Al Jazeera News on Wednesday:
The end of the war means a political settlement that dismantles the RSF political institutions. The RSF is retreating towards West Sudan, towards Darfur, where they hold a significant amount of land, and this means the war continues, especially in the light of the continuous support of certain foreign powers, particularly the UAE, who continue the supply of weapons and support to the RSF.
Other analysts said the SAF is not capable of moving quickly enough to fully capitalize on the “collapse” of RSF positions, suggesting a long and bloody fight to defeat the militia in Darfur could lie ahead.
