KHARTOUM: Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces vowed on Thursday there would be “no retreat and no surrender” after rival troops of the regular army retook nearly all of central Khartoum.
From inside the recaptured presidential palace, Sudan’s army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, at war with his former deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo since April 2023, had on Wednesday declared the capital “free” from the RSF.
But in its first direct comment since the army retook what remains of the capital’s state institutions this week, the RSF said: “Our forces have not lost any battle, but have repositioned.
“Our forces will continue to defend the homeland’s soil and secure a decisive victory. There will be no retreat or surrender,” it said.
“We will deliver crushing defeats to the enemy on all fronts.”
AFP could not independently confirm the RSF’s remaining positions in the capital.
The war has killed tens of thousands of people and uprooted more than 12 million, according to UN figures.
It has also split Africa’s third-largest country in two, with the army holding the north and east while the RSF controls parts of the south and nearly all of the vast western region of Darfur, which borders Chad.
On Wednesday, the army cleared Khartoum airport of RSF fighters and encircled their last major stronghold in the Khartoum area, just south of the city center.
An army source told AFP that RSF fighters were fleeing across the Jebel Awliya bridge, their only way out of greater Khartoum.
A successful withdrawal could link the RSF’s Jebel Awliya troops to its positions west of the city and then to its strongholds in Darfur hundreds of kilometers (miles) away.
On Wednesday, hours after Burhan arrived in the presidential palace for the first time in two years, the RSF announced a “military alliance” with a rebel group, which controls much of South Kordofan state and parts of Blue Nile bordering Ethiopia.
The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North, led by Abdelaziz Al-Hilu, had clashed with both sides, before signing a political charter with the RSF last month to establish a rival government.
On Thursday evening, witnesses in the Blue Nile state capital Damazin reported that both its airport and the nearby Roseires Dam came under drone attack by the paramilitaries and their allies for the first time in the war.
Fighters in retreat across the capital
Following a year and a half of defeats at the hands of the RSF, the army began pushing through central Sudan toward Khartoum late last year.
Analysts have blamed the RSF’s losses on strategic blunders, internal divisions and dwindling supplies.
Since the army recaptured the presidential palace on Friday, witnesses and activists have reported RSF fighters in retreat across the capital.
The army’s gains have been met with celebrations in its wartime headquarters in the Red Sea coastal city of Port Sudan, where displaced Sudanese rejoiced at the prospect of finally returning to Khartoum.
“God willing, we’re going home, we’ll finally celebrate Eid in our own homes,” Khartoum native Motaz Essam told AFP, ululations and fireworks echoing around him.
Burhan, Sudan’s de facto leader since he ousted civilian politicians from power in a 2021 coup, said on Wednesday the army was looking to form a technocratic government and had “no desire to engage in political work.”
“The armed forces are working to create the conditions for an elected civilian government,” Burhan said in a meeting with Germany’s envoy to the Horn of Africa, Heiko Nitzschke, according to a statement from Burhan’s office.
The RSF has its origins in the Janjaweed militia unleashed by then strongman Omar Al-Bashir more than two decades ago in Darfur.
Like the army, the RSF has sought to position itself as the guardian of Sudan’s democratic uprising which ousted Bashir in 2019.
The United States has imposed sanctions on both sides. It accused the army of attacks on civilians and said the RSF had “committed genocide.”
Burhan and Dagalo, in the fragile political transition that followed Bashir’s overthrow, forged an alliance which saw both rise to prominence. Then a bitter power struggle over the potential integration of the RSF into the regular army erupted into all-out war.
Sudan paramilitaries vow ‘no surrender’ after Khartoum setback
https://arab.news/4mdwj
Sudan paramilitaries vow ‘no surrender’ after Khartoum setback
- Rapid Support Forces said it would 'deliver crushing defeats to the enemy on all fronts'
- War has killed tens of thousands of people and uprooted more than 12 million in Sudan, according to UN figures
Israeli military orders evacuation of most of Gaza’s southern city of Rafah
- Israel ended ceasefire with Hamas and renewed its war earlier this month
- The evacuation orders appear to cover nearly all of Rafah and nearby areas
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip: The Israeli military on Monday issued sweeping evacuation orders covering most of Rafah, indicating it could soon launch another major ground operation in the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip.
Israel ended its ceasefire with the Hamas militant group and renewed its air and ground war earlier this month. At the beginning of March it cut off all supplies of food, fuel, medicine and humanitarian aid to the territory’s roughly 2 million Palestinians to pressure Hamas to accept changes to the truce agreement.
The evacuation orders appeared to cover nearly all of the city and nearby areas. The military ordered Palestinians to head to Muwasi, a sprawl of squalid tent camps along the coast. The orders came during Eid Al-Fitr, a normally festive Muslim holiday marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.
Israel launched a major operation in Rafah, on the border with Egypt, last May, leaving large parts of it in ruins. The military seized a strategic corridor along the border as well as the Rafah crossing with Egypt, Gaza’s only gateway to the outside world that was not controlled by Israel.
Israel was supposed to withdraw from the corridor under the ceasefire it signed with Hamas in January under US pressure, but it later refused to, citing the need to prevent weapons smuggling.
Israel has vowed to intensify its military operations until Hamas releases the remaining 59 hostages it holds — 24 of whom are believed to be alive. Israel has also demanded that Hamas disarm and leave the territory, conditions that were not included in the ceasefire agreement and which Hamas has rejected.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel would take charge of security in Gaza after the war and implement US President Donald Trump’s proposal to resettle Gaza’s population in other countries, describing it as “voluntary emigration.”
That plan has been universally rejected by Palestinians, who view it as forcible expulsion from their homeland, and human rights experts say it would likely violate international law.
Hamas, meanwhile, has insisted on implementing the signed agreement, which called for the remainder of the hostages to be released in exchange for a lasting ceasefire and an Israeli pullout. Negotiations over those parts of the agreement were supposed to have begun in February but only preliminary talks have been held.
The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, rampaging through army bases and farming communities and killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians. The militants took another 251 people hostage, most of whom have since been released in ceasefires or other deals.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not say how many were civilians or combatants. At its height, the war had displaced some 90 percent of Gaza’s population, with many fleeing multiple times.
Large areas of Gaza have been completely destroyed, and it’s unclear how or when anything will be rebuilt.
Israeli military orders evacuation of most of Gaza’s southern city of Rafah
- Israel ended its ceasefire with the Hamas militant group and renewed its air and ground war earlier this month
- The evacuation orders appeared to cover nearly all of the city and nearby areas
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip: The Israeli military on Monday issued sweeping evacuation orders covering most of Rafah, indicating it could soon launch another major ground operation in the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip.
Israel ended its ceasefire with the Hamas militant group and renewed its air and ground war earlier this month. At the beginning of March it cut off all supplies of food, fuel, medicine and humanitarian aid to the territory’s roughly 2 million Palestinians to pressure Hamas to accept changes to the truce agreement.
The evacuation orders appeared to cover nearly all of the city and nearby areas. The military ordered Palestinians to head to Muwasi, a sprawl of squalid tent camps along the coast. The orders came during Eid Al-Fitr, a normally festive Muslim holiday marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.
Israel launched a major operation in Rafah, on the border with Egypt, last May, leaving large parts of it in ruins. The military seized a strategic corridor along the border as well as the Rafah crossing with Egypt, Gaza’s only gateway to the outside world that was not controlled by Israel.
Israel was supposed to withdraw from the corridor under the ceasefire it signed with Hamas in January under US pressure, but it later refused to, citing the need to prevent weapons smuggling.
Israel has vowed to intensify its military operations until Hamas releases the remaining 59 hostages it holds — 24 of whom are believed to be alive. Israel has also demanded that Hamas disarm and leave the territory, conditions that were not included in the ceasefire agreement and which Hamas has rejected.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel would take charge of security in Gaza after the war and implement US President Donald Trump’s proposal to resettle Gaza’s population in other countries, describing it as “voluntary emigration.”
That plan has been universally rejected by Palestinians, who view it as forcible expulsion from their homeland, and human rights experts say it would likely violate international law.
Hamas, meanwhile, has insisted on implementing the signed agreement, which called for the remainder of the hostages to be released in exchange for a lasting ceasefire and an Israeli pullout. Negotiations over those parts of the agreement were supposed to have begun in February but only preliminary talks have been held.
The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, rampaging through army bases and farming communities and killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians. The militants took another 251 people hostage, most of whom have since been released in ceasefires or other deals.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not say how many were civilians or combatants. At its height, the war had displaced some 90 percent of Gaza’s population, with many fleeing multiple times.
Large areas of Gaza have been completely destroyed, and it’s unclear how or when anything will be rebuilt.
Israel PM picks ex-navy commander as new security chief
- Former navy commander Eli Sharvit would be the next head of Shin Bet
- Netanyahu’s government moved to oust agency chief Ronen Bar on March 21
JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu picked former navy commander Eli Sharvit to be the next head of the domestic security agency, his office said Monday, despite the supreme court freezing the dismissal of the incumbent.
“After conducting in-depth interviews with seven worthy candidates, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to appoint former Israel navy commander, Vice-Admiral Eli Sharvit as the next director of the ISA (Shin Bet),” his office said in a statement.
It said Sharvit had served in the military for 36 years, including five years as navy commander.
“In that position, he led the force building of the maritime defense of the territorial waters and conducted complex operations against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran,” the statement said.
Netanyahu’s government moved to oust agency chief Ronen Bar on March 21, after previously citing an “ongoing lack of trust.”
But after petitions filed by Israel’s opposition and a non-governmental organization, the supreme court suspended the government’s dismissal of Bar.
According to the court, the freeze will remain in place until the appeals are presented before April 8.
Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara had said immediately after the March 21 ruling that Netanyahu was “prohibited” from appointing a new Shin Bet chief.
But Netanyahu insisted it was up to his government to decide who heads the domestic security agency.
Bar’s relationship with the Netanyahu government was strained after he blamed the executive for the security fiasco of Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
It was further strained by a Shin Bet investigation into a case dubbed in media reports as “Qatargate” over alleged covert payments to a Netanyahu aide from Qatar.
‘Waited for death’: Ex-detainees recount horrors of Sudan’s RSF prisons
- Mouawad and Aziz were among several Egyptian traders imprisoned RSF paramilitaties when the Sudan civil war broke out in April 2023
- Along with thousands of other detainees, they were beaten, flogged, electrocuted or forced into backbreaking labor
KAFR ABU SHANAB, Egypt: For almost two years, Emad Mouawad had been repeatedly shuttled from one Sudanese paramilitary-run detention center to another, terrified each day would be his last.
The 44-year-old Egyptian merchant spent years selling home appliances in neighboring Sudan before fighters from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) stormed his Khartoum home in June 2023, taking him and six others into custody.
“They accused us of being Egyptian spies,” he told AFP, back home in Kafr Abu Shanab, a quiet village in Egypt’s Fayoum governorate southwest of Cairo.
The RSF has accused Egypt of involvement in the war, which Cairo has denied.
“We were just traders, but to them, every Egyptian was a suspect,” said Mouawad, recalling how his captors searched their phones and home.
They found nothing, but that did not spare the group, who were blindfolded, crammed into a truck and driven to one of the RSF’s many detention sites in Khartoum.
It was two months into the RSF’s war with the army, and hundreds of thousands of people had already fled to the Egyptian border, seeking safety.
“We couldn’t just go and leave our things to be looted,” said Mouawad.
“We had debts to pay, we had to guard our cargo at any cost.”
Cell without windows
In a university building-turned-prison in the Sudanese capital’s Riyadh district, Mouawad was confined with eight other Egyptians in a three-by-three-meter (10-by-10-feet) cell without any windows.
Other cells held anywhere between 20 and 50 detainees, he said, including children as young as six and elderly men, some of them in their 90s.
Food, when it came, “wasn’t food,” said Ahmed Aziz, another Egyptian trader detained with Mouawad.
“They would bring us hot water mixed with wheat flour. Just sticky, tasteless paste,” Aziz told AFP.
Water was either brackish and polluted from a well, or silt-filled from the Nile.
Disease spread unchecked, and many did not survive.
“If you were sick, you just waited for death,” Aziz said.
According to Mouawad, “people started losing their immunity, they became nothing but skeletons.”
“Five — sometimes more, sometimes fewer — died every day.”
Their bodies were often left to rot in the cells for days, their fellow detainees laying beside them.
And “they didn’t wash the bodies,” Mouawad said, an important Muslim custom before a dignified burial.
Instead, he heard that the paramilitaries just “dumped them in the desert.”
Living nightmare
Mouawad and Aziz were among tens of thousands vanished into prisons run by both the RSF and the rival Sudanese army, according to a UN report issued earlier this month.
Since the war began in April 2023, activists have documented the detention and torture of frontline aid workers, human rights defenders and random civilians.
The UN report said the RSF has turned residential buildings, police stations and schools into secret prisons.
Often snatched off the streets, detainees were beaten, flogged, electrocuted or forced into backbreaking labor.
The army has also been accused of torture, including severe beatings and electric shocks.
Neither the army nor the RSF responded to AFP requests for comment.
Soba, an infamous RSF prison in southern Khartoum, may have held more than 6,000 detainees by mid-2024, the UN said.
Aziz, who was held there for a month, described a living nightmare.
“There were no toilets, just buckets inside the cell that would sit there all day,” he said.
“You couldn’t go two weeks without falling sick,” Aziz added, with rampant fevers spreading fear of cholera and malaria.
At night, swarms of insects crawled over the prisoners.
“There was nothing that made you feel human,” said Aziz.
Mohamed Shaaban, another Egyptian trader, said RSF guards at Soba routinely insulted and beat them with hoses, sticks and whips.
“They stripped us naked as the day we were born,” Shabaan, 43, told AFP.
“Then they beat us, insulted and degraded us.”
RSF war crimes
Both the RSF and the army have been accused of war crimes, including torturing civilians.
Mohamed Osman, a Sudanese researcher at Human Rights Watch, said that while “the army at least has a legal framework in place,” the RSF “operates with complete impunity.”
The paramilitary force “runs secret facilities where people are taken and often never seen again,” Osman told AFP.
Despite their ordeals, Mouawad, Aziz and Shaaban were among the luckier ones, being released after 20 months in what they believe was a joint intelligence operation between Egypt and Sudan’s army-aligned authorities.
Finally back home in Egypt, they are struggling to recover, both physically and mentally, “but we have to try to turn the page and move on,” said Shaaban.
“We have to try and forget.”
Palestinian patients in Gaza dying due to lack of medical supplies, equipment: American surgeon
- Dr. Mark Perlmutter spent three weeks treating patients in Al-Aqsa and Nasser hospitals
- He was inside Nasser Hospital when Israeli airstrike targeted Hamas finance chief Ismail Barhoum
LONDON: An American surgeon working in Gaza has described the dire conditions in hospitals, saying Palestinian patients have died due to a lack of medical supplies and equipment.
Dr. Mark Perlmutter, who spent three weeks treating patients in Al-Aqsa and Nasser hospitals, told the BBC that doctors are operating without soap, antibiotics or X-ray facilities.
“The small community hospital, Al-Aqsa, is a tenth the size of any of the facilities in my home state — maybe smaller — and it did well to manage those horrible injuries,” he told the broadcaster following his second trip to the Palestinian enclave.
“Nevertheless, because of lack of equipment, many, many of those patients died, who would certainly not have died at a better-equipped hospital.”
He described treating severely wounded children, including a 15-year-old girl hit by Israeli machinegun fire while riding her bicycle and a boy, the same age, who was in a car with his grandmother after receiving warnings to evacuate from the north.
“They were both macerated and shredded by Apache gunships,” Perlmutter said. “The girl will be lucky if she keeps three of her limbs.”
Perlmutter was inside Nasser Hospital when an Israeli airstrike targeted Hamas finance chief Ismail Barhoum.
He said Barhoum was receiving medical treatment and had a right to protection under the Geneva Convention. The Israeli military said he was in the hospital “in order to commit acts of terrorism.”
With most hospitals in Gaza barely functioning, Perlmutter praised the commitment and dedication of the Palestinian medical staff, which he said go above and beyond the efforts of foreign doctors like himself.
“They all abandon their families, they volunteer and often work without pay. We get to go home in a month, which they don’t,” he said.
The UN’s humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, has called the situation in Gaza “dire,” noting that humanitarian aid remains blocked at border crossings.
Israel’s onslaught has killed more than 15,000 Palestinian children in Gaza, the Hamas-run Health Ministry has said, adding that since Israel broke a ceasefire and resumed its strikes on March 18, 921 Palestinians have been killed.
Perlmutter warned that if the Israeli attacks continue, hospitals operating without urgent medical supplies will see more wounded Palestinians die from treatable injuries.
