BBC witnesses the battle for Khartoum

BBC has heard evidence of the atrocities committed by the fighters who retired in a raging battle to control the Sudanese capital, Yartom.

The city has been kept by the RSF rapid support forces (RSF) since the beginning of the brutal civil war in the country almost two years ago – but the army has regained a lot of it and is believed to be on the right path to seize the rest.

The capital will be a tremendous victory for the army and a turning point in the war, although in itself it will not end the conflict.

In recent weeks, the forces cordoned off Khartoum, where they left the south after its height across central Sudan, and cleared the city’s areas in the north and east, while pressing the remaining RSF fighters to the center.

Large areas of the entire reclaimed land are destroyed.

While traveling with the army, we traveled in the past after a bloc of damaged buildings and niqab – some of them black with fire, and many brands with bullet holes.

The sidewalks in front of them were full of perforated vehicles, pieces of neglected furniture, dirty residues of looted goods and other debris.

But even in places that seem not derived, terrorism is new.

In Hag Youssef, an area of ​​Khartoum, east of the Nile River, the population described chaos and violence as the flight of RSF civilian fighters.

“It was a shock,” says Antestar Adam Suleiman.

Two of her sons, 18 -year -old Mozamil, were 21 -year -old, sitting next to the house with a friend. Mrs. Suleiman says that the RSF soldiers ordered them inside, then shot them at the back when they entered the gate.

He told me that Mozamil escaped a bullet in his leg, but “our friend died immediately.”

“Then the men wanted to enter the house, and my mother tried to hold the door, pushed and pushed. They spotted a phone on the ground, caught it and left.

Modher died the next morning because the hospital’s blood bank was removed due to the long power outage and was unable to obtain the transport it needs.

Mrs. Suleiman says she knows RSF soldiers and has previously participated with them to try to get rid of violence.

One of them told her: “We came to die, we are people of death.”

She says she told them: “If you come to death, this is not the place to die.”

However, a lot of death is what Mrs. Suleiman witnessed in this war.

She says, “Many people have died:” I used to do these shocks. “

A few buildings, Asma Mubarak Abdel Karim told me that she and a group of women had fallen into fighting with the closure of Sudanese forces.

She says they faced the retreat of the RSF soldiers who accused them of secession to the army because they were in a market in the army -controlled lands.

“They shot the ground around us, around our feet, terrifying,” she says, and explained how they then pulled a woman to an empty house and raped her.

She says the RSF fighter carried the woman at gunpoint and told her: “Come with us.”

Karim says he was hitting her with his weapon.

Then we heard the shooting and the man asked her to: “take it out! Do this! Do that! “Then the fighting around us intensified and we could not hear more – the bullets were falling in the area, so we hid inside the house.”

She erases tears when she was asked about the best thing for her now.

“Security”, as you say quietly, “the best thing is security. They have tortured us very terrible.”

A RSF spokesman denied reports, saying that the group was controlling this area for two years “without any major crimes” and that “tremendous killings” were reported in the areas taken by the army.

The army and allied militias were accused of carrying out widespread atrocities after recovering lands, especially the central state of Gizira.

The United Nations and the United States say that both sides have committed war crimes, but they allocated RSF for criticizing mass rape and accusing genocide.

Not only are the RSF Foot soldiers who are moving.

The senior officials of their homes in the nearby Carvuri suburb abandoned.

The RSF elite merged itself in the Khartoum Foundation in front of the paramilitary group and the army turned against each other in April 2023 in a battle for control.

Carrefury is now frighteningly empty and completely looting.

Even the deputy commander of the House of Representatives, Abdul Rahim Hamdan Dagalo, and the brother of the group’s leader, did not save.

The large empty swimming pool in the courtyard is scattered with garbage.

The sofas are fluctuated in spacious rooms, broken windows, and bare gold jewelry boxes, a safe, high waist door is pulled.

The army says it believes that most of the RSF High Command is now outside the city, and that those who are still fighting for the heart of Khartoum are beginners leaders and relevant soldiers.

We were told that the army was using drones to shoot down the leaflets urging the remaining fighters to leave instead of fighting on the street.

The samples we showed written in Arabic but also French, apparently directed at foreign fighters from the neighboring Chad.

One of them says: “Place your weapon, change into civilian clothes, and leave the area to save your life.”

In Khartoum in the north, near the Nile, RSF was removed several months ago, but calm is punctured regularly due to the sound of the bombing while the army is fired at the group’s positions through the river.

Many people here say they finally feel safe enough to sleep at night, but they still imagine widespread damage.

Zainab Othman Al -Hajj showed the wreckage of her house, and told me that my RSF fighters would come at night and break the door if you did not open it.

“They filled the backpacks, and even my food supplies, sugar, my cheap, my cheap, and soap, they took it,” before they burned the house in the end, “she says.

“This was not a war,” she says, referring to the ash pile, as its brother -in -law was once stood up, the charred bed tires in the destroyed bedrooms.

“This was a chaos: There was steal, theft and theft, that’s all.”

A few streets we meet Hussein Abbas.

He is approximately 70 years old, walks with cane and runs a compact bag below an empty street towards a horizon of burned and burned buildings.

He tells us that he was displaced three times since he left the capital seven days after the war began.

“At the moment when I went here, I cried almost,” while tears began to roll his cheeks. “For two years, two years did not see this place. We have suffered a lot from severe suffering.”

Survivors like Mr. Abbas come back slowly to try to save their homes.

The army now has the upper hand in this terrible war, but there is still a lot of suffering that still comes to the people of Sudan.