Development follows the recapture of presidential palace last week, in key victory for armed forces.
Sudan’s army has recaptured Khartoum airport from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), “fully securing it”, according to military sources.
Soldiers also encircled areas surrounding the airport in the Sudanese capital on Wednesday, a key development in a two-year-old conflict between the armed forces and rival RSF.
Troops “surrounded the strategic Jebel Awliya area” south of central Khartoum, the last large RSF stronghold in the area, a military source told the AFP news agency, requesting anonymity because he is not authorised to brief the media.
The army also secured both sides of the Manshiya bridge, which crosses the Blue Nile in Khartoum, leaving the Jebel Awliya bridge just south of the capital as the only crossing out of the area still under RSF control.
The military, at war with the RSF since April 2023, launched a campaign this week to push the paramilitary forces out of central Khartoum, after recapturing the presidential palace in a key victory on Friday.
RSF fighters had been stationed inside the airport, just east of central Khartoum’s government and business district, since the war began.
Across the city, witnesses and activists reported that RSF fighters have been retreating southwards from neighbourhoods they previously controlled, ostensibly towards Jebel Awliya.
Witnesses said that RSF had mainly stationed its forces in southern Khartoum to secure their withdrawal from the capital via bridges to the neighbouring city of Omdurman.
‘Significant gains’
“These are quite significant gains by the Sudanese armed forces just in the past few hours,” said Al Jazeera’s Hiba Morgan, reporting from Khartoum on Wednesday.
“The airport was one of the first places that the RSF took control of during the first days of the conflict, and it was split into two,” with part of it under government control and part under RSF control, she said.
“With the army’s progress in the past few hours, the army was able to retake full control of the airport, including the civilian side … They were also able to gain control of several residential districts around the airport.”
The RSF did not seem to be “putting up much of a fight”, Morgan added.
Elbashir Idris, an independent Sudan analyst and activist, told Al Jazeera: “The RSF’s collapse has been quicker than the army’s ability to deploy itself”.
In Khartoum “we have seen videos yesterday of many residents, and even prisoners who were under RSF controlled territory, freeing themselves and running with full jubilation in the streets – without seeing an RSF militiaman in sight,” he noted.
“This news [about the army retaking the airport] is very welcoming to a lot of Sudanese people who have lost their homes within the capital city two years ago, and this win has come at the RSF’s collapse,” Idris added.
In nearly two years, the war has killed tens of thousands of people, uprooted more than 12 million and created the world’s largest hunger and displacement crises.
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