The regular army of Sudan recaptured this Saturday from the hands of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces the strategic city of Uad Madani, the capital of the State of Jazira, located in the center of the country, at the gates of the national capital, Khartoum. If control of the city, one of the main cities in Sudan, is secured, the advance would represent the biggest victory for the Armed Forces in more than a year and a half of civil war, and could accelerate the conflict in Khartoum, where the paramilitaries are also located. on the defensive since the end of September.
The Sudanese Army General Staff issued a statement Saturday afternoon saying its troops had entered Uad Madani in the morning and were working to “eliminate pockets of rebels within the city.” The army spokesman, Nabil Abdallah, and an officer, on condition of anonymity, confirmed to Morning Express late in the afternoon that they had “liberated” the city. In the past week, the army had made significant gains in Jazira and had begun to enclose Uad Madani from the south, east and west. What happened on Saturday suggests that the Rapid Support Forces chose to withdraw.
Uad Madani had been under paramilitary control since December 2023, when they occupied the city with little resistance after the army withdrew without explanation. Until then, some 700,000 people lived in the city, which in the previous months had become a refuge for tens of thousands of displaced people, especially from Khartoum, where the war broke out, and a key logistics center for aid agencies. humanitarian aid, whose operations were then interrupted.
At the time, the collapse of the army in Uad Madani and in the rest of the State of Jazira, where almost six million people lived and which had traditionally remained on the sidelines of Sudan’s peripheral conflicts, generated deep confusion and great shock. social. It also multiplied distrust towards the army and criticism towards the military leadership, including its commander, Abdel Fattá Al Burhan, while triggering calls for civilians to enlist and expedite the training and delivery of weapons to new recruits.
Until now, the occupation of Jazira, an eminently rural State, and the subjugation of its population by the paramilitaries, who lacked administrative capacity, had been sustained on the basis of expelling a large part of its inhabitants and injecting terror into the who could not or would not flee through widespread and systematic atrocities. One of the only instances in which Jazira received international attention was last June, when a paramilitary assault on the town of Uad al Nora left more than a hundred dead. In the last year, the State had also plunged into a deep humanitarian crisis.
The situation began to change rapidly from October, when the army launched an offensive in Jazira almost simultaneously with other parts of the country after having previously regained control of the neighboring state of Sennar, to the south. Violence in Jazira spiked later that month after the commander of the Rapid Support Forces in the state, Abu Aqla Keikal, defected and joined the army, helping to break his loose chain of command and led to its subsequent fracture into several factions with great autonomy.
What followed was a fierce paramilitary retaliation campaign, first targeting communities in eastern Jazira, which is where Keikal, the defecting commander, is from. Fighters from the Rapid Support Forces raided villages where they carried out massacres, raped women and girls, and mass looted homes and markets. They also spread videos abusing and mistreating civilians. Local groups also documented arson and even the poisoning of food sent to a besieged city.
Many of these crimes have been compared to those perpetrated by paramilitaries in the Darfur region, in the west of the country, since the beginning of the civil war, and which this Tuesday the United States Government determined to have constituted genocide. Violence in Sudan against civilians is widespread, also by the army, whose bombing is usually highly indiscriminate. But in regions like Darfur, and to a lesser extent Jazira, it has adopted a markedly ethnic character by the paramilitaries.
The entry of the army into Uad Madani this Saturday was greeted with civil celebrations in several cities in Sudan, including the captured city itself and others such as Omdurman, Khartoum’s twin city, and more controlled towns in the north, center and east of the country. by the Armed Forces, as shown in videos shared on social networks.
