Sudan's army repulse an attack on their Khartoum headquarters
Buildings gutted by fire as fighting rages in central Khartoum
The Sudan Armed Forces yesterday repulsed a major attack on their headquarters in Khartoum, but the attack damaged or destroyed buildings in the area and fighting has resumed this morning.
An office tower belonging to the Ministry of Justice burned down on the western side of SAF’s defensive perimeter, and another large building caught fire on the grounds of the General Command itself.
RSF attacked from the west, south, and east using tanks, artillery, technicals, and infantry. In the map above, the red markers and arrows indicate sightings of tanks, which RSF captured last month from the Armored Corps in southwest Khartoum.
The clash markers and fires are based on geolocated videos.
Both the RSF and SAF have placed snipers in tall buildings in the area, making it difficult for troops of either side to move freely without coming under fire. This has made the towers themselves targets for attack, including with mortars, machine guns, and heavier weapons. For example, the below video was filmed by an RSF soldier yesterday afternoon from near the Goethe-Institut. The video shows multiple burning fires, gutted buildings from previous fires, and bullet marks in other buildings.
The Ministry of Justice building is visible at 0:50 (the fire having mostly cooled by this point), a smaller nearby fire possibly from a burning vehicle (1:08) is also seen, as well as an active fire at General Command (2:48).
We located video of a second fire burning at General Command yesterday, near the Military Intelligence building, though not at that building itself. The nearby General Intelligence headquarters already burned in a previous attack.
In a statement yesterday evening, the SAF spokesman said, “The rebel militia attempted at dawn today to attack some outer positions in the vicinity of the General Command, but by the grace of God it was defeated and we inflicted losses amounting to dozens of dead and wounded, and the destruction of a large number of combat vehicles, and the remnants of the militia were forced to flee in a short time.”
For its part, the RSF media team made no formal statement about the attack, though they shared a propagandistic montage of videos filmed by fighters in the area. There is no visual evidence that the RSF made significant territorial gains yesterday.
Nevertheless, the significant fires and multiple confirmed sightings of tanks suggest that they inflicted damage on the SAF’s defenses in the area. They may be using incendiary explosive shells captured from Armored Corps last month. Videos filmed in August show that they captured many tanks and mobile artillery, which would be useful for attacking fortified targets like the SAF forces around General Command.
RSF’s attack on General Command comes after fierce street-to-street fighting slowed down their in the Al-Shajara area in southwest Khartoum, where last month they captured about half of the Armored Corps base.
It also comes on the heels of a speech by the RSF commander-in-chief who spoke angrily about the SAF Commander-in-Chief’s foreign travels. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan was in Uganda yesterday during the attack on his headquarters.