The BBC has heard evidence of atrocities committed by retreating fighters in a battle raging for control of Sudan’s capital city Khartoum.
The city has been held by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) since the start of the country’s brutal civil war nearly two years ago – but the army has retaken much of it and believes it is on track to seize the rest.
Regaining the capital would be a tremendous victory for the military and a turning-point in the war, although by itself would not end the conflict.
In recent weeks troops have mostly encircled Khartoum, coming up from the south after surging through central Sudan, and clearing city districts in the north and east, squeezing the remaining RSF fighters into the centre.
Vast areas of the reclaimed territory are completely destroyed.
Travelling with the army, we drove past block after block of damaged and ransacked buildings – some of them blackened by fire, many pockmarked with bullet holes.
The recent fighting has left blocks of flats destroyed in Khartoum’s Haj Yusuf district
The pavements in front of them were littered with vandalised vehicles, pieces of discarded furniture, the soiled remains of looted goods and other debris.
But even in places that look untouched, the terror is fresh.
In Haj Yusuf, a district of Khartoum east of the River Nile, residents described chaos and violence as fleeing RSF fighters turned on civilians.
“It was a shock, they came suddenly,” says Intisar Adam Suleiman.
Two of her sons, 18-year-old Muzamil and 21-year-old Mudather, were sitting by the house with a friend. The RSF soldiers ordered them inside, then shot them in the back as they entered the gate, says Ms Suleiman.
Muzamil escaped with a bullet wound in his leg but “our friend died instantly”, he told me.
“Then the men wanted to enter the house, and my mother tried to hold the door shut, pushing and pushing. They spotted a phone on the ground, grabbed it and left. I went and called the father of my friend so he could come and do first aid, but we couldn’t rescue him.”
Muzami, the 18-year-old son of Intisar Adam Suleiman, was sitting outside his house with his brother and friend when they were targeted
Mudather died the next morning because the hospital’s blood bank had been decimated by a long power outage and he could not get the transfusion he needed.
Ms Suleiman says she knew the RSF soldiers and had engaged with them before to try and de-escalate 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 for death.”
Yet too much death is what Ms Suleiman has seen in this war.
So many people have died, she says: “I’ve become used to these traumas.”
A few blocks away, Asma Mubarak Abdel Karim tells me she and a group of women got caught up in the fighting as Sudanese forces closed in.
She says they were confronted by retreating RSF soldiers who accused them of siding with the military because they had been to a market in army-held territory.
“They shot on the ground around us, around our feet, terrifying us,” she says, explaining how they then pulled one woman into an empty house and raped her.
She says the RSF fighter held the woman at gunpoint and told her: “Come with us.”
He was beating her with his weapon, says Ms Karim.
“And then we heard shooting and the man ordering her to: ‘Take it off! Do this! Do that!’ Then the fighting around us intensified and we couldn’t hear any more – bullets were falling in the area, so we hid inside the house.”
The Sudanese military continues to make significant gains in Khartoum – for the first time since the conflict began
She wipes away tears when asked what the best thing about the situation is for her now.
“Security,” she says softly, “the best thing is security. They tortured us so terribly.”
An RSF spokesman denied the reports, saying the group had controlled this area for two years “without any major crimes” and that “massive killings” had been reported in areas taken by the military.
The army and allied militias have been accused of carrying out widespread atrocities after recapturing territory, in particular the central Gezira state.
The UN and US say both sides have committed war crimes, but singled out the RSF for criticism of mass rape and accusations of genocide.
It is not only the RSF foot soldiers who are on the move.
Top officials have abandoned their homes in the nearby affluent suburb of Karfuri.
The RSF elite had embedded itself into Khartoum’s establishment before the paramilitary group and the army turned on each other in April 2023 in a battle for control.
Karfuri is now eerily empty and thoroughly looted.
Even the house of the RSF’s deputy commander, Abdel Rahim Hamdan Dagalo, and brother of the group’s leader, was not spared.
The big empty swimming pool in the yard is scattered with rubbish.
Sofas in the spacious rooms are overturned, the windows broken, gold jewellery boxes are bare, the door of a waist-high safe has been pulled off.
The army says it believes that most of the RSF senior leadership is now outside the city, and that those still fighting for the heart of Khartoum are the junior commanders and lower-ranking soldiers.
Most senior RSF leaders have left the upmarket suburb of Karfuri, with their houses looted, including the group’s second in command
We were told the military was using drones to drop leaflets urging remaining fighters to leave rather than fight street by street.
The samples we were shown are written in Arabic but also French, apparently directed at foreign fighters from neighbouring Chad.
“Lay down your weapon, change into civilian clothes, and leave the area to save your life,” says one.
In Khartoum North, closer to the Nile, the RSF was pushed out several months ago, but the calm is regularly punctured by the sound of shelling as the army fires at the group’s positions across the river.
Many people here say they finally feel safe enough to sleep at night but are still taking stock of extensive damage.
Zeinab Osman al-Haj showed me the wreckage of her house, telling me the RSF fighters would come at night and break down the door if she didn’t open it.
“They filled their backpacks, and even my food supply, my sugar and my flour and my oil, the soap, they took it,” before eventually burning the house down, she says.
“This was not a war,” she says, pointing at the pile of ashes where her brother-in-law’s library once stood, the charred bedframes in the ruined bedrooms.
“This was chaos: there was theft and stealing and robbery, that’s it.”
The moment I got off here I almost cried. For two years, two years I haven’t seen this place. We suffered a lot, extreme suffering”
A few streets down we meet Hussein Abbas.
He is nearly 70 years old, walking with a cane and dragging a battered suitcase down an empty street toward a skyline of burned and gutted buildings.
He tells us he has been displaced three times since leaving the capital seven days after the war began.
“The moment I got off here I almost cried,” he says, as tears begin rolling down his cheeks. “For two years, two years I haven’t seen this place. We suffered a lot, extreme suffering.”
Survivors like Mr Abbas are slowly returning to try and salvage their homes.
The army has the upper hand now in this terrible war, but there is much suffering still to come for Sudan’s people.
