Stench of death in battle for Khartoum

THE Sudanese army recaptured the presidential palace in the capital, Khartoum, from the Rapid Support Forces on Friday, dealing a major blow to the paramilitaries who responded with deadly drone attacks.

- 

State television broadcast scenes of fighters celebrating in the palace, before three of its journalists and a number of army personnel were killed in a drone strike, an army source reported.

They were “covering the army retaking the Republican Palace” when an RSF one-way attack drone struck the complex, the source said on condition of anonymity. Information Minister Khalid al-Aiser said a state television producer, video journalist and driver were among the dead.

In a statement shared to Telegram, the RSF said it had launched a “lightning operation” around the palace which “killed more than 89 enemy personnel and destroyed various military vehicles”. “The battle for the Republican Palace is not over yet,” the RSF vowed, adding that their fighters remained nearby.

Meanwhile, in a war-ravaged neighbourhood in Khartoum this week, the stench from a gaping sewage pit is unbearable as Red Crescent workers pull a bloated body from deep underground. The volunteers say 14 more remain below.

“They were shot in the head, some have crushed skulls,” Hisham Zein al-Abdeen, head of forensic medicine at Sudan’s health ministry, said at the scene. The victims, he said, were either shot or beaten to death before being thrown in. Behind him, a truck idles, its flatbed already filling with bodies retrieved from the sewer well in East Nile, an eastern district of Khartoum now reduced to ruins.

Nearly two years of war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have left large swathes of the capital unrecognisable.

Once a bustling metropolis, Khartoum has seen well over 3.5 million of its people flee since the war began, according to the UN. Millions more, unable or unwilling to leave, live among abandoned buildings, wrecked vehicles and what the army says are hidden mass graves.