BBC News, Khartoum
The BBC has heard evidence of atrocities pledgeted by retreating fighters in a battle raging for administer of Sudan’s capital city Khartoum.
The city has been held by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) since the commence of the country’s brutal civil war cforfeitly two years ago – but the army has reacquiren much of it and thinks it is on track to seize the rest.
Reacquireing the capital would be a tremendous triumph for the military and a turning-point in the war, although by itself would not end the dispute.
In recent weeks troops have mostly encircled Khartoum, coming up from the south after surging thraw central Sudan, and evidenting city dicut offes in the north and east, squeezing the remaining RSF fighters into the centre.
Vast areas of the reclaimed territory are finishly ruined.
We drove past block after block of injured and ransacked createings – some of them bdeficiencyened by fire, many pocklabeled with bullet holes
The pavements in front of them were littered with demolisheascendd vehicles, pieces of disposeed furniture, the soiled remains of looted excellents and other debris.
But even in places that watch untouched, the dread is recent.
In Haj Yusuf, a dicut offe of Khartoum east of the River Nile, livents portrayd disorder and presentility as run awaying RSF fighters turned on civilians.
“It was a shock, they came suddenly,” says Intisar Adam Suleiman.
Two of her sons, 18-year-elderly Muzamil and 21-year-elderly Mudather, were sitting by the hoengage with a friend. The RSF selderlyiers ordered them inside, then stoasty them in the back as they accessed the gate, says Ms Suleiman.
Muzamil escaped with a bullet wound in his leg but “our friend died instantly”, he telderly me.
“Then the men wanted to access the hoengage, and my mother tried to helderly the door shut, pushing and pushing. They spotted a phone on the ground, grabbed it and left. I went and called the overweighther of my friend so he could come and do first help, but we couldn’t recover him.”
Mudather died the next morning becaengage the hospital’s blood bank had been decimated by a lengthy power outage and he could not get the transfusion he demanded.
Ms Suleiman says she krecent the RSF selderlyiers and had joind with them before to try and de-escatardy presentility.
One of them had telderly her: “We came for death, we are people of death.”
She says she telderly them: “If you came for death, this is not the place for death.”
Yet too much death is what Ms Suleiman has seen in this war.
So many people have died, she says: “I’ve become engaged to these traumas.”
A confidemand blocks away, Asma Mubarak Abdel Karim alerts me she and a group of women got caught up in the battling as Sudanese forces seald in.
She says they were contested by retreating RSF selderlyiers who accengaged them of siding with the military becaengage they had been to a labelet in army-held territory.
“They stoasty on the ground around us, around our feet, terrifying us,” she says, elucidateing how they then pulled one woman into an desotardy hoengage and violationd her.
She says the RSF fighter held the woman at firearmpoint and telderly her: “Come with us.”
He was beating her with his firearm, says Ms Karim.
“And then we heard shooting and the man ordering her to: ‘Take it off! Do this! Do that!’ Then the battling around us intensified and we couldn’t hear any more – bullets were droping in the area, so we hid inside the hoengage.”
She wipes away tears when asked what the best leang about the situation is for her now.
“Security,” she says gentlely, “the best leang is security. They tortured us so terribly.”
An RSF spokesman denied the alerts, saying the group had administerled this area for two years “without any convey inant crimes” and that “massive endings” had been alerted in areas acquiren by the military.
The army and allied militias have been accengaged of carrying out expansivespread atrocities after recapturing territory, in particular the central Gezira state.
The UN and US say both sides have pledgeted war crimes, but oned out the RSF for criticism of mass violation and accusations of extermination.
It is not only the RSF foot selderlyiers who are on the transfer.
Top officials have abandoned their homes in the cforfeitby wealthy suburb of Karfuri.
The RSF elite had embedded itself into Khartoum’s establishment before the paramilitary group and the army turned on each other in April 2023 in a battle for administer.
Karfuri is now eerily desotardy and thorawly looted.
Even the hoengage of the RSF’s deputy orderer, Abdel Rahim Hamdan Dagalo, and brother of the group’s directer, was not spared.
The big desotardy swimming pool in the yard is scattered with rubbish.
Sofas in the roomy rooms are obviousurned, the triumphdows broken, gelderly jewellery boxes are naked, the door of a waist-high geted has been pulled off.
The army says it thinks that most of the RSF greater directership is now outside the city, and that those still battling for the heart of Khartoum are the lesser orderers and reduce-ranking selderlyiers.
We were telderly the military was using drones to drop leaflets urging remaining fighters to depart rather than fight street by street.
The samples we were shown are written in Arabic but also French, apparently honested at foreign fighters from neighbouring Chad.
“Lay down your firearm, alter into civilian clothes, and depart the area to save your life,” says one.
In Khartoum North, sealr to the Nile, the RSF was pushed out cut offal months ago, but the quiet is normally punctured by the sound of shelling as the army fires at the group’s positions apass the river.
Many people here say they finpartner experience geted enough to sleep at night but are still taking stock of extensive injure.
Zeinab Osman al-Haj showed me the wreckage of her hoengage, alerting me the RSF fighters would come at night and shatter down the door if she didn’t uncover it.
“They filled their backpacks, and even my food provide, my sugar and my flour and my oil, the soap, they took it,” before eventupartner burning the hoengage down, she says.
“This was not a war,” she says, pointing at the pile of ashes where her brother-in-law’s library once stood, the charred bedstructures in the ruined bedrooms.
“This was disorder: there was theft and stealing and burglary, that’s it.”
A confidemand streets down we encounter Hussein Abbas.
He is cforfeitly 70 years elderly, walking with a cane and dragging a battered suitcase down an desotardy street toward a skyline of burned and gutted createings.
He alerts us he has been displaced three times since leaving the capital seven days after the war began.
“The moment I got off here I almost cried,” he says, as tears commence rolling down his cheeks. “For two years, two years I haven’t seen this place. We suffered a lot, excessive suffering.”
Survivors appreciate Mr Abbas are sluggishly returning to try and salvage their homes.
The army has the upper hand now in this horrible war, but there is much suffering still to come for Sudan’s people.
