BBC witness the battle for Khartoum

The BBC has heard evidence of atrocities carried out by retiring fighters in a battle raging to control the capital of Sudan Kharut.

The city has been held by the paramilitary forces of rapid support (RSF) since the beginning of the country’s brutal civil war nearly two years ago – but the army has conquered much of it and believes it is about to take advantage of others.

The return of the capital would be a huge victory for the military and a repeated point in the war, although it would not end the conflict.

In recent weeks, the troops have mostly surrounded Harsum, coming out of the south after rising through Central Sudan and clearing urban areas north and east, squeezing the rest of RSF fighters in the center.

The vast areas of the regenerated territory are completely destroyed.

Traveling with the army, we passed a block after a block of damaged and destroyed buildings – some of them blackened with fire, very stole with bullets holes.

On the sidewalks in front of them were strewn with vandalized vehicles, pieces of discarded furniture, contaminated remains of looted goods and other debris.

But even in places that look untouched, the terror is fresh.

In Hajj Yusuf, an area of ​​Khartoum east of the Nile River, residents describe chaos and violence as running RSF fighters facing civilians.

“It was a shock. They came suddenly,” says Itisar Adam Suleiman.

Two of her sons, 18-year-old Muzamil and 21-year-old Mudatter, were sitting next to the house with a friend. The RSF soldiers ordered them inside, and then shot them into the back when they entered the gate, says Gi Suleiman.

Muzamil escaped with a bullet wound to his feet, but “our friend died instantly,” he told me.

“Then the men wanted to get into the house, and my mother tried to hold the door, pushing and pushing. They noticed a phone on the ground, grabbed it and left. I went and called my friend’s father so that he could come and make first aid, but we couldn’t save him.”

Mudatter died the next morning, as the hospital’s blood bank was shortened by a long interruption of power supply and he could not get the necessary transfusion.

Mrs. Suleiman says she knew RSF soldiers and committed to them before trying and de-consult violence.

One of them had told her, “We came for death, we are people of death.”

She says she told them, “If you came for death, this is not the place of death.”

Still, too much death is what D -Ja Suleiman saw in this war.

So many people have died, she says, “I got used to these injuries.”

At a few blocks, Asma Mubarak Abdel Karim tells me that she and a group of women have been fighting when the Sudanese forces are closed.

She says they have encountered the withdrawal of RSF soldiers who accused them of having away with the military because they were in the market in the army.

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

She says the RSF warriors kept the woman under shooting and told her, “Come with us.”

He was beating her with his weapon, says Gi Karim.

“And then we also heard the man who ordered her to:” Download him! Do this! Do this! “Then the fighting around us intensified and we couldn’t hear more – the bullets fall in the area, so we hid inside the house.”

She wipes off tears when he asks him what is best in the situation for her now.

“Security,” she says quietly, “The best is security. They tormented us so terribly.”

A RSF spokesman denied reports, saying that the group had controlled this area for two years “without major crimes” and that “massive murders” were reported in areas taken by the military.

The army and allied militias have been accused of carrying out widespread atrocities following the seizure of territory, more special in the central state.

The UN and us are told that both countries have committed war crimes but have separated RSF for criticism of mass rape and accusations of genocide.

Not only the RSF soldiers are in motion.

Senior officials have abandoned their homes in the near -wealthy suburb of Carrefuri.

The RSF Elite had embedded in the Khartoum establishment before the paramilitary group and the army joined each other in April 2023 in a control battle.

Carrefuri is already sinisterly empty and carefully plundered.

Even the Chamber of RSF Deputy Commander Abdel Rahim Hamdan Dagalo and the brother of the group leader were not spared.

The large empty pool in the yard is scattered with garbage.

The sofas in the spacious rooms are overturned, the windows broken, the gold jewelry boxes are naked, the high waist safe is pulled.

The army says it believes that the majority of RSF senior management is already out of town and that those who are still fighting for the heart of Khartoum are junior commanders and lower-ranking soldiers.

We were told that the military was using drones to release leaflets urging other fighters to leave rather than fight a street down the street.

The samples that were shown to us are written in Arabic, but also French, apparently aimed at foreign fighters from neighboring Chad.

“Put your weapon, dress in civilian clothes and leave the area to save your life,” says one.

In Khartoum to the north, closer to the Nile, RSF was pushed a few months ago, but the tranquility is regularly borne by the sound of the firing as the army shoots the group positions across the river.

Many people here say that they finally feel safe enough to sleep at night, but still take stock of great damage.

Zayenab Osman al-Haj showed me the remains of his house, telling me that RSF fighters would come at night and break the door if it didn’t open it.

“They filled their backpacks, and even my supply of food, sugar and my flour and my oil, soap, they took it,” they eventually burn the house, “she says.

“It was not a war,” she says, pointing to the pile of ashes where the library of her son -in -law once stood, the charred beds in the destroyed bedrooms.

“It was chaos: there was theft and theft and robbery, that’s all.”

Several streets we meet with Hussein Abbas.

He is nearly 70 years old, walking with a cane and drags a battered suitcase on an empty street to the silhouette of burned and gutted buildings.

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

“The moment I went out here, I almost cried,” he says as the tears began to roll on his cheeks. “For two years, two years, I have not seen this place. We have suffered a lot, extreme suffering.”

Surviving as G -n -Abas slowly return to try to save their homes.

The army already has the upper hand in this terrible war, but there is a lot of suffering to come to Sudan’s people.