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17-03-2025
KHARTOUM: The BBC has heard evidence of atrocities committed by retreating fighters in a battle raging for control of Sudan’s capital city Khartoum.
The city has been held by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) since the start of the country’s brutal civil war nearly two years ago but the army has retaken much of it and believes it is on track to seize the rest.
Regaining the capital would be a tremendous victory for the military and a turning-point in the war, although by itself would not end the conflict.
In recent weeks troops have mostly encircled Khartoum, coming up from the south after surging through central Sudan, and clearing city districts in the north and east, squeezing the remaining RSF fighters into the centre.
Vast areas of the reclaimed territory are completely destroyed.
Travelling with the army, we drove past block after block of damaged and ransacked buildings, some of them blackened by fire, many pockmarked with bullet holes.
The pavements in front of them were littered with vandalized vehicles, pieces of discarded furniture, the soiled remains of looted goods and other debris but even in places that look untouched, the terror is fresh.
In Haj Yusuf, a district of Khartoum east of the River Nile, residents described chaos and violence as fleeing RSF fighters turned on civilians.
“It was a shock, they came suddenly,” says Intisar Adam Suleiman.
Two of her sons, 18-year-old Muzamil and 21-year-old Mudather, were sitting by the house with a friend. The RSF soldiers ordered them inside, then shot them in the back as they entered the gate, says Suleiman.
Muzamil escaped with a bullet wound in his leg but “our friend died instantly”, he told me.
“Then the men wanted to enter the house, and my mother tried to hold the door shut, pushing and pushing. They spotted a phone on the ground, grabbed it and left. I went and called the father of my friend so he could come and do first aid, but we couldn’t rescue him.”
Mudather died the next morning because the hospital’s blood bank had been decimated by a long power outage and he could not get the transfusion he needed.
Ms Suleiman says she knew the RSF soldiers and had engaged with them before to try and de-escalate violence.
One of them had told her; “we came for death, we are people of death.”
She says she told them: “If you came for death, this is not the place for death.”
Yet too much death is what Suleiman has seen in this war.
So many people have died, she says: “I’ve become used to these traumas.”
A few blocks away, Asma Mubarak Abdel Karim tells me she and a group of women got caught up in the fighting as Sudanese forces closed in.
She says they were confronted by retreating RSF soldiers who accused them of siding with the military because they had been to a market in army-held territory.
“They shot on the ground around us, around our feet, terrifying us,” she says, explaining how they then pulled one woman into an empty house and raped her.
She says the RSF fighter held the woman at gunpoint and told her; “come with us.”
He was beating her with his weapon, says Karim.
“And then we heard shooting and the man ordering her to: ‘Take it off! Do this! Do that!’ Then the fighting around us intensified and we couldn’t hear any more – bullets were falling in the area, so we hid inside the house.” She wipes away tears when asked what the best thing about the situation is for her now.
“Security,” she says softly, “the best thing is security. They tortured us so terribly.” (BBC)
