The Sudan armed forces (SAF) have advanced in Omdurman for the first time since the beginning of the war with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in April last year.
It is reported that the SAF in the Karari military area, north of Omdurman, have joined their peers in the engineering corps in the south of the city, where they have been besieged by the RSF since April.
Last week, the SAF announced they had entered the Souq Omdurman – one of the country’s oldest markets – in Omdurman, which is considered to be the twin city to Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, which lies on the opposite side of the Nile River.
This came after reports of Iran helping the SAF with new Mohajer 6 drones following a visit by the leader of the army, Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, to Tehran.
A week before the army’s advancement in Omdurman, people in neighbourhoods in Ombada, in the north-west of the city, were ordered to evacuate their homes within 72 hours. The SAF allegedly arrested about 100 men, who were said to have been stripped, blindfolded and lashed before being released.
One man, Awad Hakeem, a former car mechanic from Ombada, died two nights ago after the ordeal. Hakeem had previously been arrested twice by the army and allegedly tortured before his release.
“We were humiliated, we were told that we didn’t have any sense of patriotism while we were beaten. Some of us were in tears,” said one man arrested by the army.
Most of the those arrested belong to the minority Gouran ethnic group in Sudan and worked in the markets selling and buying clothes. Like most of Sudan’s cities, Khartoum is segregated along ethnic and racial lines.
SAF soldiers, especially the new recruits, are allegedly looting the houses of the Gouran people in north and west Omdurman. “They kicked us out, apparently just to loot our houses. I lost everything … they took all my furniture,” said one resident.
In early August, the army ordered the same ethnic group of people living by the Nile in eastern Omdurman to leave their homes. When some returned to retrieve their belongings, they found their homes occupied by soldiers and their belongings gone.
Most of Khartoum’s 11 million people have fled the city, but millions are still there, especially the poor and those from distant states such as Darfur and Kordofan, which are experiencing fierce fighting.
The SAF have been accused of targeting other non-Arab groups hailing mainly from Darfur, who used to live in Wad Madani city, south of Khartoum, before it was captured by the RSF in December. It has also been accused of killing dozens and arresting hundreds more.
The military governor of the state, Mohamed el-Badawi, has called on the intelligence services to arrest all those who work in markets as vendors and beggars, accusing them of working as spies for the RSF. Most of the market traders in Sudan are from Darfur and Kordofan, the country’s most restive regions that have witnessed a long civil war.
Sudan, since its independence in 1956, has been ruled by minority Arab and Nubian elites hailing from tribes living on the Nile in northern Sudan.
Sudan’s army, which created the RSF to fight a proxy war on its behalf in Darfur, has been accused of committing a genocide against the non-Arab communities in Darfur, killing more than 1 million people and displacing millions more from their homes. As a result, the former Sudanese president and army general Omar al-Bashir was the first sitting president in the world to be indicted to the international criminal court in The Hague.
The RSF is also accused of ethnic cleansing of the main non-Arab community of the Masalit people in West Darfur during the latest violence in the region, displacing hundreds of thousands of people and killing thousands.
More than 10,000 people have been killed in Sudan since the beginning of the war in a struggle by two generals over power.
