Sudan’s Army Retakes the Presidential Palace in Khartoum

Sudanese military forces recaptured the presidential palace early Friday in the battle-scarred capital, Khartoum, signaling a potential turning point in Sudan’s devastating civil war, now approaching its third year.

Soldiers posted triumphant selfie videos at the entrance of the devastated palace, which overlooks the Nile River, after days of heavy fighting with the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F., the powerful paramilitary group that the army is battling for control of Sudan.

“We’re inside!” shouted an unidentified officer as cheering soldiers swarmed around him in one video posted Friday morning. “We’re in the Republican Palace!”

Still, the R.S.F. fought back for the rest of the day on Friday, firing missiles from armed drones that hovered over the palace compound, Sudanese military officials said. One of them struck a crew from Sudan’s state television station, killing two journalists and a driver.

Two officers from the military’s media wing, including its top official in Khartoum, were also killed in the attack outside the palace.

The palace, an emblem of power in Sudan for two centuries, appeared to be in ruins. But retaking it was a major symbolic victory for Sudan’s army, which lost most of Khartoum to the R.S.F. in the early days of the war in April 2023, leaving its forces confined to a handful of embattled bases scattered across the vast city.

It was a strategic win, boosting the military’s drive to expel the paramilitaries from Khartoum entirely, following a six-month counteroffensive that has swung the balance of the war in the military’s favor.

Only days earlier, the R.S.F. leader, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, had vowed to stand his ground. “Do not think that we will retreat from the palace,” he said last week in a video address from an undisclosed location.

But on Thursday the military pressed hard on its target with a blistering assault on R.S.F. positions that ultimately forced the paramilitaries to flee.

The victory celebrations on Friday were shared by the unlikely coalition of Sudanese militias that fight under the army. They included hard-line Islamists; battle-tested fighters from the western region of Darfur; and some of the civilian revolutionaries who in 2019 helped oust Sudan’s authoritarian leader, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who had ruled for three decades.

By Friday evening, it was unclear if the R.S.F. intended to defend the territory it still held in the south of the city, or begin to withdraw to its stronghold in western Sudan. Analysts noted that the paramilitaries were left with a single escape route — a narrow bridge over a major dam on the Nile at Jebel Aulia, 25 miles south of the capital.

Sudan’s military has previously bombed approach roads to the dam, causing quiet consternation among international aid groups, worried that serious damage to the dam could set off catastrophic floods downriver.

Sudan’s war erupted in April 2023 after months of tension between the military chief, Gen. Abdul Fattah al-Burhan, and General Hamdan of the R.S.F. The two men had seized power together in a military coup in 2021, but they could not agree on how to integrate their forces.

The R.S.F. had the upper hand for the first 18 months of the war, backed by external support from foreign sponsors including the United Arab Emirates and Wagner mercenaries from Russia.

But since the military launched a major counteroffensive in September, its forces have recaptured states in southeastern Sudan and gradually pushed the R.S.F. out of Khartoum.

After taking several strategic bridges on the Nile, the military seized the north and east of the city in recent months, before turning its sights on the presidential palace.

That sprawling compound, on the southern bank of the Blue Nile, has long occupied a central place in Sudan’s history. Established in the early 19th century under Ottoman-Egyptian colonization, the palace has been destroyed and rebuilt several times.

It was the scene of a famous colonial-era episode in 1885, when followers of a revolutionary cleric, Muhammad Ahmad, who was known as the Mahdi, killed the British ruler of Sudan, Gov. Charles Gordon, on the steps of the palace.

In 2015, Mr. al-Bashir opened a new palace, funded and built by China, next to the colonial-era one. The new palace was also a focus of the tumult that followed the ouster of Mr. al-Bashir in 2019, when jockeying between civilian and military leaders led to the 2021 military coup.

Protected by the Republican Guard, the new palace was reported to have secret tunnels and rooms, and was the focus of most of the raucous celebrations on Friday.

As the R.S.F. fighters have withdrawn from eastern and northern Khartoum since January, the war’s grim toll has become starkly apparent.

Entire districts have become a charred wasteland, as New York Times reporters saw during the past week in the city.

Bullet-pocked vehicles lay scattered across deserted streets. Apartment blocks stood torched or looted, and banks were blown open. White smoke billowed from a giant wheat silo.

In the city center, army snipers trained their rifles through the windows of a deserted luxury apartment block overlooking the Nile. On the far bank, a riverboat slumped on its side. A surveillance drone buzzed overhead.

A lace curtain billowed around Sgt. Maj. Ismail Hassan as he peered through his binoculars at the bombed-out presidential palace, which sat amid a cluster of hollowed-out office blocks.

“They have many snipers deployed in the tall buildings,” Sergeant Major Hassan said. “That’s what makes it so hard.”

The R.S.F.’s best snipers came from Ethiopia, he added, citing military intelligence reports. A document found by The Times at a deserted R.S.F. base in the city, listing recent Ethiopian recruits, supported that idea.

By some estimates, the capital’s prewar population of about eight million has been reduced to two million. In recently recaptured areas, the army has moved residents to temporary camps on the edge of the city, where the army is screening for R.S.F. sympathizers, several residents said.

For those still in the city, there was a palpable sense of relief that the R.S.F. fighters were gone.

“In the days before they left, they demanded money,” said Kamal Juma, 42, as he tapped water from a broken pipe in the street. “If you couldn’t pay, they shot you.”

Even if the military manages to drive the R.S.F. from Khartoum, there is little prospect of the war ending soon, analysts say.

What started as a power feud between the two generals has exploded into a much wider conflict fueled by a bewildering array of foreign powers.

In parts of the city, bushes sprouted in empty streets, adding to the apocalyptic air. Faded billboards, erected before the war, advertised goods at one-tenth of their current prices — a reflection of war’s crushing economic cost.

But the picture was markedly different in Omdurman, west of the Nile and controlled by the army. There, markets and restaurants were bustling, and even jewelry stores had reopened as residents streamed back.

Even in Omdurman, though, death is never far.

On Monday night, a volley of R.S.F. rockets landed in a quiet street where six neighbors had gathered under a palm tree to drink coffee after fasting for Ramadan.

After an explosion rocked his house, Moamer Atiyatallah stumbled through the cloud of dust, calling out to his friends under the palm tree, “What happened, guys?”

Nobody answered. All six men — a carpenter, an auto trader and a rickshaw driver, among others — had been killed, as well as two other men who were passing in the streets.

An hour after the strike, wailing women had spilled into the dark street, where stony-faced men picked up scraps of flesh from the ground and gathered them into plastic bags. A distraught young girl ran past.

“Father!” she screamed. “Father!”

Abdalrahman Altayeb contributed reporting.