Sudanese army forces on Tuesday broke a paramilitary siege on the key southern city of Kadugli, two army sources told AFP, in their latest advance through the Kordofan region.
"Our forces have entered Kadugli and lifted the siege," one source said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to brief the media.
South Kordofan state capital Kadugli, where the United Nations confirmed a famine last year, has been besieged for much of Sudan's nearly three-year war between the army and the Rapid Support Forces, which broke out in April 2023.
The siege has seen the city surrounded by RSF fighters and their local allies, a faction of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-North led by Abdelaziz el Hilu.
The allies had also besieged the neighbouring town of Dilling, which the UN has said suffered similar famine conditions, before army troops broke through in late January.
The army this week advanced across about 100 kilometres that separate the two cities.
"After fierce battles on the road between Dilling and Kadugli, our forces defeated the RSF and their supporting Hilu militia, inflicting heavy losses upon them," another army source told AFP.
Since it broke out, the war has killed tens of thousands and left 11 million people displaced.
Reversing paramilitary push
Local Sudanese media shared footage that appeared to show army-allied forces celebrating the arrival of army troops in the city.
Since the war began, around 80 percent of Kadugli's population, about 147,000 people, have fled the city, the UN said last week.
Kordofan, a vast, oil-rich, and fertile region, is currently the war's fiercest frontline.
Since seizing the army's last holdout position in the western Darfur region last October, the RSF has pushed through Kordofan in an attempt to retake Sudan's central corridor.
The paramilitary RSF tightened their siege on Kadugli and Dilling, traded deadly strikes with the army across the region, and seized Sudan's largest oil field, Heglig, on the border with South Sudan.
Violence in the region, which has included drone strikes killing dozens at a time, has brought hundreds of thousands to the brink of starvation and forced 88,000 people to flee between October and January, according to UN figures.
On Monday, the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, Jan Egeland, called South Kordofan "Sudan's most dangerous and neglected front line".
"Entire cities are being starved, forcing families to flee with nothing," he said in a statement after a visit to the region.
