Sudan’s army has seized control of the country’s central bank and its presidential palace. These buildings had previously been controlled by the Rapid Support Forces, a genocidal militia that had seized control of most of Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, and looted much of the city. The army also apparently killed hundreds of militia members who tried to escape into neighboring areas.
The bank’s takeover comes a day after the army seized control of the presidential palace in a significant military victory.
But the RSF retaliated to Friday’s takeover with a drone attack that killed three journalists and several army personnel.
Army sources told AFP that RSF fighters on Friday fled into buildings in al-Mogran, an area west of the palace housing banks and business headquarters.
In the area, paramilitary forces posted snipers in high-rises that overlook the city of Omdurman across the Nile River and the ministries in central Khartoum.
The RSF militia had controlled most of Sudan’s capital for most of two years. Last month, the RSF killed over 100 people by shelling a market in Sudan’s second-largest city, Omdurman, which is across the Nile River from the capital city of Khartoum. “It was the latest in a series of deadly attacks in the escalated civil war that has wrecked the northeastern African country,” the Associated Press says. The dead and wounded included many women and children.
Sudan is in the middle of a bloody civil war in which both sides are brutal toward civilians. On one side is a genocidal militia — the Rapid Support Forces. “The RSF and allied militias have systematically murdered men and boys — even infants — on an ethnic basis, and deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence,” says the U.S. State Department. On the other side is Sudan’s military, which has used chemical weapons, and tactics that include “indiscriminate bombing of civilian infrastructure, attacks on schools, markets, and hospitals, and extrajudicial executions,” according to the U.S. Treasury Department.
The Rapid Support Forces are much worse than Sudan’s military, but both sides are brutal.
In January, the State Department formally declared that the Rapid Support Forces are committing genocide in Sudan, more than a year after the genocide began. As we noted in 2023, “militias aligned with the RSF…referred to locally as the Janjaweed, or ‘devils on horseback’ — were carrying out ethnic killings and have also looted and burned the palace of the sultan of the Masalit tribe. The Janjaweed are ethnically Arab militias; the Masalit are a local African tribe.” Moreover, the “RSF has targeted Masalit refugee camps, killed people attempting to escape to neighboring Chad, kidnapped and raped women and systematically killed influential figures in the community, such as tribal leaders and human rights lawyers and monitors.” The RSF is “engaged in ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s Darfur region, killing non-Arab peoples in Sudan’s Darfur region. It also abducted and killed a provincial governor. Khamis Abakar, the governor of West Darfur, was murdered hours after he accused the RSF of ‘genocide’,” in a “statement to a Saudi news channel. He was killed in the city of el-Geneina, the capital of West Darfur. ‘Civilians are being killed randomly and in large numbers,’ he said.”
The RSF has repeatedly shelled Sudan’s biggest refugee camp, Zamzam, where famine was first declared in Sudan. Half of Sudan’s 50 million people are very hungry. Last year, the Clingendael Institute, a Dutch think-tank, estimated that hunger and related diseases would kill at least 6 million people in Sudan by 2027.
Sudan’s national museum was looted by the RSF. The museum housed “the world’s largest and most comprehensive Nubian archaeological collection, along with artifacts from other ancient civilizations including the Kingdom of Kush (8th-4th century BCE) and the medieval Kingdom of Alwa. The Nubian collection” included “embalmed mummies dating back to 2,500 BC, making them among the earliest and most important such examples in the world.” The museum also had some Christian relics from Sudan’s pre-Islamic period. Sudan, like Egypt, has pyramids and mummies.
The RSF interfered with harvests in Sudan’s Jazira state, which is “home to one of the largest irrigation systems in the world,” reported CNN. Thousands of farmers fled the RSF into areas controlled by Sudan’s military, leaving fields untended.
