Sudan army takes control of Radio and Television Corporation in Omdurman

The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) announced today that took control of the National Radio and Television Corporation in old Omdurman, after weeks of fierce fighting in the area.

The SAF said on its Facebook page that they thwarted an attempt by RSF troops to break out of the cordon imposed on them around the lieutenants and radio area., “in the early hours of this morning”.

They seized “most of the RSF equipment and vehicles”.

The SAF spokesperson reported that SAF soldiers “destroyed a group of RSF-allies that tried to support the RSF from the west”.

The army today posted video clips and photos of “the destruction of the forces of the terrorist Dagalo family” and of fleeing RSF soldiers in the neighbourhoods of El Mohandesin and the National Radio and Television Corporation along the River Nile in old Omdurman.

The corporation’s premisses were occupied by the paramilitary Support Forces (RSF) not long after the war erupted on April last year.

In end December, the army began an offensive against the RSF, led by Lt Gen Mohamed ‘Hemedti Dagalo and his brother and RSF Deputy commander Abdelrahim Dagalo in Omdurman. In mid-February, a breakthrough in central Omdurman, the nation’s largest city was reported.

“The breakthrough relieves the 10-month siege of a military district known as Corps of Engineers [El Mohandisin], and it represents the army’s first major offensive success of the war,” Sudan War Monitor (SWM) reported at the time.

“The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are being steamrolled in Sudan’s largest city, Omdurman, losing a large amount of territory, men, and equipment under a relentless combined-arms assault involving infantry, drones, and artillery,” SWM said today.

In the end of February, SAF regained the Abrof and Beit El Mal neighbourhoods in old Omdurman. Army soldiers were besieging the buildings of the Radio and Television Corporation east of Beit El Mal. 

The Sudanese Journalists Syndicate (SJS) expressed its concern that the battles would increase the risk of damaging or destroying the corporation’s archives that are nearly 100 years old.

Sources close to the army this morning confirmed movements of the armed forces near the destroyed Shambat Bridge, the Wad El Bashir Bridge, and other areas in and around old Omdurman.

In Khartoum, the army renewed its artillery shelling on the El Nahda neighbourhood and its environs in the Southern Belt*.

* Khartoum’s Southern Belt is part of the periphery of the capital inhabited by people earlier displaced by wars in Darfur, Kordofan, and Blue Nile region and South Sudanese refugees, and by impoverished farmers from various parts of the country who lost their lands to banks when they could not pay their debts anymore.