KHARTOUM: Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces said Wednesday its fighters seized a strategic zone on the border with Egypt and Libya, as the regular army announced its withdrawal from the area.
The announcements came a day after the army accused forces loyal to eastern Libyan commander Khalifa Haftar of launching a cross-border attack alongside the RSF, the first allegation of direct Libyan involvement in the Sudanese war.
“As part of its defensive arrangements to repel aggression, our forces today evacuated the triangle area overlooking the borders between Sudan, Egypt and Libya,” army spokesman Nabil Abdallah said in a statement.
Since April 2023, the war in Sudan has pitted army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan against his erstwhile ally Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who leads the RSF.
In a statement on Wednesday, the RSF said its fighters had “liberated the strategic triangle area,” adding that army forces had retreated southward “after suffering heavy losses.”
The army said on Tuesday that Haftar’s troops in coordination with the RSF attacked its border positions in a move it called “a blatant aggression against Sudan.”
The war has effectively split Sudan in two, with the army holding the center, east and north, while the paramilitaries and their allies control nearly all of Darfur and parts of the south.
The fighting has killed tens of thousands and displaced 13 million, including four million who fled abroad, triggering what the United Nations has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Efforts by international mediators to halt the fighting have so far failed, with violence continuing to escalate across the western Darfur region and the Kordofan region in the country’s south.

ROME: An 11-year-old Palestinian boy who survived an Israeli air strike in Gaza last month, which killed his father and nine siblings, was due to arrive in Italy Wednesday for treatment.
Adam and his mother, paediatrician Alaa Al-Najjar, were due to fly to Milan in northern Italy on Wednesday evening alongside his aunt and four cousins, Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said.
“Adam will arrive in Milan and will be admitted to the Niguarda (hospital), because he has multiple fractures and he will be treated there,” Tajani told Rtl radio.
A plane carrying Palestinians in need of medical care is scheduled to land at 7:30 p.m. (1730 GMT) at Milan’s Linate airport, according to the foreign ministry.
Adam had a hand amputated and suffered severe burns across his body following the strike on the family house in the city of Khan Yunis on May 23.
His mother was at work when the bomb hit the house, killing nine of her children and injuring Adam and his father, doctor Hamdi Al-Najjar, who died last week.
Al-Najjar, who ran to the house to find her children charred beyond recognition, told Italy’s La Repubblica daily: “I remember everything. Every detail, every minute, every scream.”
“But when I remember it’s too painful, so I try to keep my mind focused entirely on Adam,” she said in an interview published Wednesday ahead of their arrival.
Asked by his mother during the interview to describe his hopes, Adam said he wanted to “live in a beautiful place.”
“A beautiful place is a place where there are no bombs. In a beautiful place the houses are not broken and I go to school,” he said, according to La Repubblica.
“Schools have desks, the kids study their lessons but then they go play in the courtyard and nobody dies.
“A beautiful place is where they operate on my arm and my arm works again. In a beautiful place my mother is not sad. They told me that Italy is a beautiful place,” he said.
Al-Najjar said she has packed the Qur’an, their documents and Adam’s clothes.
“I am heartbroken. I am leaving behind everything that was important to me. My husband, my children, the hospital where I worked, my job, my patients,” she said.
“People are dying of hunger. If not of hunger, of bombs. We would just like to live in peace,” she told the daily.
Adam is one of 17 children being brought to Italy on Wednesday from Gaza along with relatives, Tajani said.
The October 7, 2023, Hamas attack that triggered the war resulted in the deaths of 1,219 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official figures.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says at least 54,981 people, the majority civilians, have been killed in the territory since the start of the war. The UN considers these figures reliable.