Khartoum, Jan 17: Commander of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan emphasised the SAF's ability to defeat the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), despite external pressures.
Al-Burhan, also chairman of Sudan's Transitional Sovereign Council, made the remarks on Thursday while addressing a crowd of citizens and soldiers in Wad Madani, the capital city of Gezira State in central Sudan, according to a statement by the sovereign council.
On January 11, the SAF recaptured Wad Madani from the RSF, which had controlled the city for more than a year, Xinhua news agency reported.
"The armed forces will defeat the rebel militia," he said, stressing his country would not be subjugated to external pressures, mainly referring to the new sanctions imposed on him by the US.
Earlier on Thursday, Washington imposed sanctions on Al-Burhan over his army's "lethal attacks" against civilians, days after slapping sanctions on RSF's commander, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, whose group the US accused of committing "genocide" in Sudan's Darfur region.
Earlier on Monday, SAF accused the paramilitary RSF of launching drone attacks targeting the Merowe Dam in Sudan's Northern State, which led to a widespread power outage.
"As part of its systematic campaign targeting military sites, vital facilities and the country's development projects, and after the successive defeats inflicted on it by our armed forces on all fronts, the RSF militia targetted the Merowe Dam hydroelectric plant with a number of drones," SAF's 19th Infantry Division said in a statement.
"The ground anti-aircraft weapons repelled the attack," the statement said, noting that the attack resulted in "some damages," without giving further details.
The Merowe Dam, a hydroelectric dam on the Nile River inaugurated in 2009, is located about 350 km north of the Sudanese capital Khartoum, and is one of the largest hydropower projects in Africa.
Video clips on social media showed that a fire broke out at an electricity transmission station that transmits electricity from the dam to the national grid.
According to eyewitnesses, Merowe, Port Sudan, Omdurman, Atbara and Dongola cities have witnessed power outage.
The RSF has not commented yet on the SAF statement.
Sudan has been gripped by a devastating conflict between the SAF and the RSF since mid-April 2023, which claimed at least 29,683 lives and displaced nearly 15 million people, either inside or outside Sudan, according to the latest estimates by international organisations.
