Dubai (TIP): When conflict flared in Khartoum almost a month ago, pitting Sudan’s armed forces and their heavy weaponry against a paramilitary force born out of an agile but lightly-armed desert militia, it looked like it might prove a one-sided fight. But the head of the army, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, swiftly found air power and artillery alone could not stop his rival’s men, who were able to storm into Burhan’s residence deep within army headquarters in the first hours of the conflict that erupted on April 15, a total of ten sources, from both sides of the conflict, told Reuters. Burhan, the de facto head of state, himself picked up an AK-47 rifle and opened fire before his security pulled him to safety, one of his bodyguards told Reuters, in previously unreported details of how close he came to being toppled, or killed, in those first days.
More than 30 of his guards died in the ensuing battle, before the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fighters retreated from the residence in the capital, said the bodyguard, who asked not to be named.
Reuters was unable to reach representatives of the army and the RSF for comment about the events at the presidential residence, or about the strategy of the two sides.
The account highlights the preferred tactic of Burhan’s opponent General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, namely fighting at close quarters and playing to the strengths of his RSF.
Almost a month after the fighting began, and despite almost daily air strikes, the army has not dislodged the RSF from the capital, where its men have taken up positions in residential areas and several key institutions.
Over the past decade, the RSF grew out of a ragtag force of desert fighters to become virtually a parallel military with bases in the capital – quickly abandoned when fighting began – and with enough supplies to force Burhan to talks without hope of winning a quick victory.
The conflict has left ordinary Sudanese, many of whom have flooded out of the capital, some to friends and family in more rural areas and others across the borders to neighbouring states, questioning how a rival to the military was allowed to materialise over the past several years.
“Why did the army let Hemedti become a parallel army and threatening the normal people. Where were the leaders of the army?” said Hussein Ahmed, in a long queue at a bakery.
For troops in the RSF, which grew out for the Janjaweed, a feared horse-mounted Arab militia that helped the government quell a previous uprising in Sudan’s western region of Darfur and was rewarded by being formalised as a paramilitary force, the goal is to keep drawing the army into urban warfare where their lightly armed vehicles stand a better chance against tanks and warplanes.
(Reuters)