Gunfire and Blasts Rock Sudan’s Capital as Factions Vie for Control

NAIROBI, Kenya — Gunshots and explosions rang out on Saturday morning in several parts of Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, as months of rising tensions between rival factions of the armed forces appeared to turn into an all-out battle for control of one of Africa’s biggest countries.

Fighting that started early Saturday at military bases in southern Khartoum quickly spread across the city to the presidential palace, the headquarters of the state broadcaster and the international airport.

Videos circulating on social media showed soldiers firing in the streets, armored vehicles speeding through residential areas and travelers taking shelter on the floor of the airport amid reports of battles inside the terminal and near the runway.

The clashes came after weeks of mounting tensions between the Sudanese Army, led by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces, a powerful paramilitary group led by Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan.

By lunchtime Saturday, the Rapid Support Forces claimed in a statement to have seized the presidential palace, a guesthouse inside the military headquarters, and the country’s main international airport as well as airfields in the cities of al-Obeid and Meroe. The claims could not be independently verified.

United Nations officials and foreign diplomats have struggled in recent days to prevent the tensions from turning violent. But as worried residents hunkered in their homes early Saturday, those efforts were spectacularly collapsing.

Each side accused the other of starting the fight. In a statement, the Rapid Support Forces said it first came under attack at a camp in Soba, in the south of Khartoum, by the regular army “with all kinds of heavy and light weapons.”

A military official, speaking to the Al Jazeera news network, accused the paramilitaries of shooting first, and said they were trying to seize control of the military headquarters in the city center.

Sudan has a long experience of military coups: Since independence in 1956, the country has had more successful military takeovers than any other African country. But it has rarely seen open clashes between rival military units like the ones unfolding on Saturday, stirring fear that Sudan was tumbling into a civil war.

“There is fighting in Khartoum. There is fighting in Meroe. There is fighting around the Khartoum airport,” Amgad Fareid Eltayeb, a former adviser to Abdalla Hamdok, Sudan’s civilian prime minister who was ousted in the bloodless October 2021 military coup, said in a phone interview. “How else do you define civil war?”

Mr. Eltayeb, who said he could hear gunfire outside his home in central Khartoum, cut short the call after receiving a report that a relative’s house in Omdurman, on the other side of the Nile, had been hit during fighting there.

The ouster of Sudan’s longtime dictator, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, in a popular revolution in 2019 spurred hopes for an end to decades of internal strife and international isolation. Mr. al-Bashir, who ruled for three decades, oversaw a ruinous conflict in the south of the country that culminated in the secession of South Sudan in 2011.

He also oversaw a campaign of state-sponsored violence in the western region of Darfur from 2013 that led to him being indicted on charges of war crimes and genocide at the International Criminal Court at The Hague. Mr. al-Bashir was never brought to trial on those charges, but was convicted of corruption and other offenses after the 2019 revolution, and is currently incarcerated at the Kober prison in Khartoum.

But the popular euphoria, and hopes for democracy, that accompanied his ouster were crushed in October 2021 when the military seized power in a coup.

In December, amid a crushing economic crisis, the military agreed to hand over authority as of this month to a civilian-led government. But the process was dominated by an increasingly open rivalry between General al-Burhan and General Hamdan, who is widely known as Hemeti.

In recent months, the two generals have issued lightly veiled criticism of each other in speeches, and moved reinforcements and armored vehicles to rival military camps across the city. In an interview last month, Abdul Rahim Dagalo, the deputy commander of the Rapid Support Forces, said that a large new wall that had been built around the military headquarters was intended to protect the military chief, General al-Burhan.

“He doesn’t care what happens outside the wall,” Mr. Dagalo told The New York Times at his Khartoum villa. “He doesn’t care if the rest of the country burns.”

Residents’ worst fears of wider violence appeared to be coming true on Saturday as the fighting, which started in the south of Khartoum, quickly spread across the Nile to its twin city of Omdurman, where residents said that armed men had surrounded the offices of the state broadcaster.

A United Nations official said clashes were occurring “literally everywhere,” in Khartoum, including near the sprawling American Embassy in the southeastern corner of the capital.

John Godfrey, the United States ambassador to Sudan, said on Twitter that he had returned to Sudan on Friday night, only to wake to “the deeply disturbing sounds of gunfire and fighting.”

“I am currently sheltering in place with the Embassy team, as Sudanese throughout Khartoum and elsewhere are doing,” he wrote. “I urgently call on senior military leaders to stop the fighting.”