SUDAN’S army said it had retaken more key buildings in the capital over the weekend, as its adversary the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) were accused of massacring 45 people in Darfur.

Brigadier General Nabil Abdullah said the army had taken control of the National Intelligence Service HQ and the Corinthia Hotel in central Khartoum, several ministries and the Central Bank of Sudan. In the process soldiers killed “hundreds” of RSF fighters, he said.

The gains followed its reclamation of the Republican Palace, the pre-war seat of government, on Friday. The RSF fired drones at the palace afterwards, killing two journalists and a driver employed by the state television company.

Former UN envoy for Sudan Volker Perthes called it “a significant victory militarily and politically” and suggested that “the RSF will be largely restricted to Darfur … we will return to the early 2000s,” referring to former dictator Omar al-Bashir’s war against peripheral rebel groups.

The assessment is cold comfort for people in Darfur, where the democratic Resistance Committees said RSF troops stormed into the Malha area on Thursday, looting markets and houses and shooting civilians indiscriminately. They put a preliminary death toll at 45, including 12 women. A slightly different account of events came from the Sudanese Doctors Network, which said 48 people had been shot in a “mass execution” carried out for “ethnic reasons.”

In recent months the military has gained the initiative in the war, taking back most of Khartoum and its sister city across the Nile, Omdurman. The war broke out in April 2023, prior to which the army and RSF had collaborated to suppress the democratic movement which forced the overthrow of Mr Bashir in 2019.