The Sudanese military, along with allied armed groups, has announced the recapture of Wad Madani, a strategic city in Gezira state, after pushing out the rival Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary, Al Jazeera reports.
The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) declared victory on Saturday, marking a significant turning point in the ongoing conflict that has ravaged the country since April 2023.
“Our forces entering the city of Wad Madani this morning,” the SAF said in a statement, congratulating the Sudanese people.
The army added that it is currently “working to clean up the remaining rebel pockets inside the city.” Khalid al-Aiser, a government spokesperson, described the event as the “liberation” of the city.
The army has released a video that appears to show soldiers within Wad Madani, which the RSF had controlled since December 2023. The RSF leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, widely known as Hemedti, acknowledged the defeat in a Telegram message but insisted that the battle was not over. Hemedti attributed the defeat to what he claimed was the army’s reliance on Iranian drones and fighters from Ethiopia’s Tigray region.
Wad Madani is a strategically crucial location due to its position as a crossroads of key supply highways connecting multiple states and its close proximity to the capital, Khartoum. The conflict between the SAF and RSF has created what the United Nations describes as the world’s worst displacement crisis, leading to famine declarations in some parts of the country.
The United States recently accused the RSF of committing “genocide” and imposed sanctions on Hemedti.
The local resistance committee, a network of pro-democracy volunteer groups, hailed the army’s advance into Wad Madani as an end to “the tyranny” of the RSF. Residents in SAF-controlled cities across Sudan reportedly took to the streets to celebrate the news.
The recapture of Gezira as a whole could be a significant turning point in the war, which began over disputes about the integration of the two forces. The conflict has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people and the displacement of approximately 12 million, creating one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises. In the early months of the war, over half a million people had sought shelter in Gezira, before a lightning RSF offensive displaced upwards of 300,000 in December 2023, according to the UN.
While the army’s recapture of Wad Madani is a major setback for the RSF, the paramilitary group still maintains control over the rest of the central agricultural state of Gezira, nearly all of Sudan’s western Darfur region and areas in the south. The army, on the other hand, maintains control over the north and east, as well as parts of Khartoum.
