The military says it is working to ‘clean up the remaining rebel pockets’ inside the capital of Gezira state.

The Sudanese military and allied armed groups have entered Wad Madani, pushing out the rival Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary from the strategic city in Gezira state, according to the army.

In a statement on Saturday, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) “congratulated” people on “our forces entering the city of Wad Madani this morning” after more than a year of RSF control.

“They are now working to clean up the remaining rebel pockets inside the city,” the statement said.

The office of SAF-allied government spokesperson and Information and Culture Minister Khalid al-Aiser said the army had “liberated” the city.

The army posted a video that appears to show soldiers inside the city the RSF had held since December 2023.

In a speech shared on Telegram, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the RSF leader widely known as Hemedti, acknowledged defeat but insisted that the battle was not over.

“We lost Wad Madani, but we will reclaim it. People just need to regroup, reorganise and reassess themselves,” he said.

Hemedti attributed the defeat to what he described as the army’s reliance on Iranian drones and fighters from Ethiopia’s Tigray region.

The SAF and the RSF have been at war since April 2023, causing what the United Nations calls the world’s worst displacement crisis and declarations of famine in parts of the Northeast African country.

Wad Madani is strategic because it is a crossroads of key supply highways linking several states, and is the nearest key city to the capital, Khartoum.

Army ‘in most parts of Wad Madani’

Al Jazeera’s Hiba Morgan, reporting from Khartoum, said the SAF had been advancing towards the city in recent days.

“They have been taking over villages in the south and southeast of the [Gezira] state until this morning when they took over Hantoub Bridge – a decisive bridge that leads into the city,” she said.

“The army is now in most parts of Wad Madani,” Morgan added.

“The army and allied fighters have spread out around us across the city’s streets,” one witness told the AFP news agency from his home in central Wad Madani, requesting anonymity for his safety.

Both the SAF and the RSF have been accused of committing war crimes, including targeting civilians and indiscriminately shelling residential areas.

The paramilitary forces have been accused of summary killings, rampant looting, systematic sexual violence and laying siege to entire towns.

The United States on Tuesday said the RSF had “committed genocide” and imposed sanctions on its leader Hemedti.

The local resistance committee, one of hundreds of pro-democracy volunteer groups across the country coordinating front-line aid, hailed the Wad Madani advance as an end to “the tyranny” of the RSF.

Witnesses in SAF-controlled cities across Sudan reported dozens of people taking to the streets to celebrate the news.

Twelve million displaced

The recapture of Gezira as a whole could mark a turning point in the war that began over disputes on the integration of the two forces. Since then, tens of thousands of people have been killed and some 12 million displaced, creating one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises.

In the early months of the war, more than half a million people had sought shelter in Gezira, before a lightning RSF offensive displaced upwards of 300,000 in December 2023, according to the UN.

Most have since been repeatedly displaced as the feared paramilitaries moved further south.

The RSF still holds the rest of the central agricultural state of Gezira, as well as nearly all of Sudan’s western Darfur region and swaths of the country’s south.

The army controls the north and east, as well as parts of Khartoum.

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Al Jazeera and news agencies